Kleinman99

Experience and Its Moral Modes

:
Culture, Human Conditions,
and Disorder
ARTHUR KLEINMAN

T HE T ANNER LECTURES ON H UMAN V A L U E S

Delivered at

Stanford University
April 13-16, 1998

A RTHUR K LE I N M A N is Maude and Lillian Presley Profes-
sor of Medical Anthropology and Chair of the Depart-
ment of Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School. He
is also Professor of Anthropology at Harvard University.
He was educated at both Stanford and Harvard, and re-
ceived his M.D. from Stanford in 1967. He is a fellow of
the American Association for the Advancement of Science,
the American Psychiatric Association, the American Acad-
emy of Arts and Sciences, and the Royal Anthropological
Institute. H e has been a Guggenheim Fellow and fellow
of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sci-
ence. He directed the World Mental Health Report. In
addition to many published articles, he is the author of
numerous books, including Writing at the Margin (1995) ;
Rethinking Psychiatry (1998) ; Social Origins of Distress
and Disease (1986) ; and Patients and Healers in the Con-
text of Culture (1980), which was awarded the Wellcome
Medal for Medical Anthropology by the Royal Anthro-
pological Institute.

PROLOGUE TO THE LECTURES
What I seek to accomplish here is to bring the perspectives of
medical anthropology, cultural psychiatry, and social medicine to
bear on moral theory. I will draw on my knowledge of these dis-
ciplines along with my field research and clinical work in Chinese
society and in North America to examine moral issues concerned
with our era’s great transformation of suffering and medicine and
social life more generally. I will describe the profound implica-
tions of the truly dangerous burden of social suff ering. In response
to these human tragedies, neither the cultural resources of the pro-
grams of tradition nor those of the programs of modernity seem at
all adequate. Indeed they all-too-regularly add to the sense and
substance of disorder. Subjectivity itself is undergoing an epochal

I am deeply grateful for the opportunity to present these ideas that the Tanner
Lectures afforded. I wish to thank the three official commentators on these lectures,
Allan Werthheimer, Hazel Markus, and especially Veena Das for their reflections
and for the tonic of lively intellectual colloquy. I also wish to thank Sylvia Yanagi-
sako, Carol Delaney, Barbara Koenig, David Spiegel, and other friends and inter-
locutors at Stanford, including those in the Program of Values and Society, for their
responses. And I extend the appreciation to my colleagues Michael Herzfeld and
Amartya Sen for their thoughts regarding various parts of the argument I have
presented. I have also benefited from the responses of Robert Hefner, Charles Rosen-
berg, Stanley Tambiah, and Don Seeman. Without the acutely critical sensibility
of Joan Kleinman and the assistance of Mathew McGuire and the tremendous effort
of getting it all into (and out of) the computer by Joan Gillespie there would be
no published version at all.
I acknowledge Michael Oakshott’s Experience and Its Modes (Cambridge and
New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985 [1933]) as the source of the title of
the lectures. I am not seeking to work out Oakshott’s ideas here, but I find resonant
these few: ” ‘Experience’ stands for the concrete whole which analysis divides into
‘experiencing’ and ‘what is experienced’ ” (p. 9); “practical activity is a form of
experience” (p. 249); “a specific world of experience is the world of value”
(p. 285); and “the practical comprises all that we mean by a moral life” (p. 296).
These ideas, of course, are derivative of European philosophy, especially phenome-
nology, over the last century, and together with certain Chinese formulations, the
writings of William James, and contemporary anthropological theory are the intel-
lectual streams that build up into the source of what I have tried to develop in these
lectures.

[ 357 ]

pp. and for the Chinese setting in Arthur Kleinman and Joan Kleinman. Man’s Place in Nature
.” in Pain
as Human Experience: A n Anthropological Perspective. Good. I do so not
to amuse you with a display of my pretensions. 95-119. but because of a
keen sense that there is in this subject so much that matters for all
of us.2 Experience is
thoroughly intersubjective. 1997).
in his Hibbert Lectures at Oxford in spring 1908. William James. by reality here I mean
where things happen” (Linda Simon. and A. concreteness. “Pain
and Resistance: The Delegitimation and Relegitimation of Local Worlds. ed. Hence I need to
begin first with an ethnographic orientation to experience. 1995).358 The Tanner Lectures on Human Values
change. Brodwin.
“Moral Transformations of Health and Suffering in Chinese Society. Alfred Schutz.
3 The idea of the intersubjectivity of experience can be found in the Western
phenomenological and pragmatist traditions. households. . “Suffering and Its Professional Transforma-
tion: Toward an Ethnography of Interpersonal Experience. use what word you will . observed: “Reality. con-
1 For an extended account of the theory of experience developed here.
urban neighborhoods. negotiations. Human Nature and
Conduct (New York: Modern Library. Max Scheler.1 Those
lived engagements take place in a local world. Kleinman (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California
Press. Good. immediacy. Once I have described what I take to be the fundamental
challenge. ed. pp. so limited my skills. 101-18.
2 The concept of local worlds is developed further in Arthur Kleinman. “The Con-
sciousness of Self. 1981).” in Morality
and Health. reprinted as chapter 5 in Arthur Kleinman. experi-
ence. Medicine and
Psychiatry 15. see John Dewey.
that I must beg your indulgence with my overreaching. It may represent a deep and most dangerous transforma-
tion. 1957 119221).
B.
Writing at the Margin: Discourse between Anthropology and Medicine (Berkeley
and Los Angeles: University of California Press. T h e Phenomenology of the Social World (Evans-
ton: Northwestern University Press. p. see
Arthur Kleinman and Joan Kleinman. I will then try to indicate a possible direction for human
engagement with it. So daunting is my subject.3 It involves practices. The perspectives and research I will present deal with moral
processes at the local level of lived experience. life. 1969). 3 (1991): 275-301. 1998].” Culture. As used in this paper “local worlds” is meant to emphasize the fact
that ethnographic descriptions focus on micro-contexts of experience in villages. 359).” in T h e Principles of Psychology (Cambridge: Harvard Univer-
sity Press. P. Brandt and P. M. A. 1992). no. J. as the felt
flow of interpersonal communication and engagements. William James. Genuine Reality: A Life of William James
[New York: Harcourt Brace. . Rozin (New York and London: Routledge. following many others. work settings.
Experience I will define. and networks of bounded relation-
ships in communities where everyday life is enacted and transacted.

“Kuan-his and Network Building” Daedalus
120. and
our subjectivity emerges. 1889) . Alfred Schutz. our movements meet resistance and find directions. see George Herbert Mead. Golden Arches East: McDonald‘s in East Asia [Stanford: Stanford University
Press. 1975).” in his
Collected Works on the Chinese People (Taipei: Kuei Kwan Book Co. T h e Phenomenology of the Social World (Evanston: North-
western University Press.
ed.
T h e Practice of Theory: A n Introduction to the W o r k of Pierre Bourdieu (New
York: Macmillan. K.. Hwang:
“Face and Favor: The Chinese Power Game.5 But I shall suggest that in local
worlds we can also speak of local biologies with particular moral-
(New York: Noonday Press. Yang: “The Chinese People in Change. and other institutions. 1987. Marc Auge..
no.
and that their members may belong to several different networks at
the same time -even with these qualifications the local perdures
as the grounds of social life. Self. undergo frequent change. It is difficult to sum up this literature. but on the whole it would
seem to suggest that globalization has led to transformations in cultural.
neighborhood. yet there is still considerable evidence of the
power of local social processes to resist or reshape these influences. Within its symbolic
meanings and social interactions our senses form into a patterned
sensibility. and
other symbolic mediators. Berg-
son.” American Journal of Sociology 92. W e
are born into the flow of palpable experience. language. 1972
[1934]). 2 (1991): 63-84. 1996)). no. 1997]). and reflexively shapes our
local By local world I mean the ethnographer’s village. Ambrose King. for example. in which we are more acutely aware that
local worlds have permeable boundaries. “Théorie des pouvoirs et idéologie”: Etude
Cas en Cote-d ’Ivoire (Paris: Hermann. networks. It is a
medium in which collective and subjective processes interfuse. and Society. economic. K.
political. family. 1967) . and among the Chinese social scien-
tists who developed the movement to sinicize social science (e. I elaborate the latter especially into a position that claims
cross-cultural validity. From
the Standpoint of a Social Behaviorist (Chicago: University of Chicago Press. K. Ulf Hannerz. Places [New York: Routledge. 4 (1987) : 944-74. among such French thinkers as H.”
5 There is an extensive anthropological literature on the relation of the local
and the global (see..
. In this paper. in
Chinese). 1971 [1938]). S. Yang: “The Chinese People in Change. and psychological processes.[KLEINMAN] Experience and Its Moral Modes 359
testations among others with whom we are connected. Watson.g. 1990) .
4 On the emergence of subjectivity in interpersonal relations. Even in a
vast sea of globalization. Mind. Pierre Bourdieu. Transnational Connections: Culture. takes shape.
People. Les données immédiates de la conscience (Paris: Alcans. An unusual example is to be found
in a collection of research studies of how McDonald’s Restaurants have been a
source of both globalization and indigenization in East Asia (see James L.

as. rituals. Critical Events: A n An-
thropological Perspective on Contemporary lndia (Delhi: University Press.
1989). 1983.
8 Arthur Kleinman (“Everything That Really Matters: Social Suffering.” Harvard
Theological Review 90. 1993). A few examples are Talal Asad. Veena Das. Sub-
jectivity. Paths toward a Clearing: Radical
Empiricism and Ethnographic Inquiry (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press. matter greatly.9 The
The idea of local biologies has been developed by both social and biological
anthropologists.. Unni Wikan.. Washington D. It is in this second sense that I use the
term in this lecture. American Anthropological Association. It only clarifies that these crucial processes
need to be seen as aspects of practical rationality and local practices.
and Schutz (Phenomenology). 1400-1700 (Oxford: Ox-
. Social Experience and
Anthropological Knowledge (London and New York: Routledge. 1992]. Whereas some mean by this term that biology is represented dif-
ferently in local knowledge (see Atwood Gaines.C. and the Remaking of Human Experience in a Disordering World. Robert
Desjarlais.. Offense.
Renato Rosaldo. Dewey (Human Nature). Among anthropologists. no. in the case of anatomy
in the Chinese medical tradition vis-à-vis its representation in biomedicine. (Shelter Blues: Sanity and Selfhood among the Homeless (Philadelphia:
University of Pennsylvania Press.C. 1993]).’ ” paper presented at the panel “The Body and the Cultural and Biologi-
cal Divide. across local worlds
and historical epochs. (See also Peter Ellison’s “Reproductive Ecology and ‘Local
Biologies. That experience is characterized by overwhelming practicality does not
diminish the importance of cosmologies.. for example.)
7 See. in Proceedings.” Ethos 15 (1987) : 337-65. 1994). What exactly is at stake. Washington.360 The Tanner Lectures on Human Values
bodily connections. Genealogies of Religion:
Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and lslam (Baltimore: Johns Hop-
kins Press.” Annual Meeting.
even desperately8. or collective and individual
theorizing in religious or secular contexts.
D. John Bossy. James (“Consciousness of Self”).6
Experience is characterized by an orientation of overwhelming
practicality. 3 [1992]: 315-16) develops this point and illustrates
it with interview materials from North America and China. 1994) . See also Kirsten Hastrup and Peter Hervik.7 What so thoroughly absorbs the attention of partici-
pants in a local world is that certain things matter. Encounters with Aging:
Mythologies of Menopause in Japan and North America [Berkeley and Los Angeles:
University of California Press. 1997) provides a critical reflection on experience
as an ethnographic category that is part of his study of the homeless mentally ill in
Boston.
9 The pertinent ethnographic and historical literature on cultural difference is by
now simply immense. 178-95. others
convey the idea that biological processes defined and measured in biomedical terms
are transformed by social processes (see Margaret Lock. ed. “Grief and a Headhunter’s Rage: On the Cultural Force of Emo-
tion.
pp. “Public Grace and Private Fears: Gaiety. connections that express and constitute the
mundane and the supramundane. Christianity in the West. Ethnopsychiatry [Albany:
State University of New York Press. 1996. myths. varies. for example. sometimes extravagantly so. the most convincing ethno-
graphic presentations are those of Michael Jackson. and Sorcery
in Northern Bali. American Ethnological Society. eds.

while newer views empha-
size that culture is an active process of meaning making. representation. commercial practices. it is realized in local
worlds yet extends beyond them. 1 [1998]: 7-15).[K LEINMAN] Experience and Its M o r a l Modes 361
symbolic apparatuses of culture elaborate these meanings and con-
strain how individuals remember and act upon them so that local
worlds can be (and often are) greatly different cultural spaces.” Anthropology Today 14. it is differentially distributed across the divi-
sions of class.
I draw upon elements of both newer and older definitions. national. T h e Sorrow of the Lonely and the Burning of the
Dancers (New York: St.C. Schieffelin. defined charac-
teristics. political. The appropria-
tions of the idea of “culture” in politics. although treated as a
strawman in the guise of “cultural relativism” in moral theory in the 1980s and
earlier.
Fred Myers: Pintupi Country. In this lecture. Culture
is closely connected with political and economic processes and changes in relation to
them.
1985). Local Knowledge and Further Essays
in Interpretive Anthropology (New York: Basic Books. has local. Catherine Lutz. Martin’s Press. 1967) . Peter Gay. D. T h e Naked Heart (New York: Norton. and it contains coherences and incoherences. The
idea of culture’s appropriation as part of political and economic processes that are
historically shaped and consequential for human futures is one I am particularly
interested in and seek to develop in this lecture. Unni Wikan. and can be used hegemonically.”
Even in the same world. Clifford Geertz. and homogenous elements. 1953) . 1976). as will soon become ap-
parent to the reader. shared. T h e Cheese and the Worms: T h e Cosmos of a Sixteenth-
Century Writer (New York: Penguin Books. religion. and age cohort. See also Jean Delumeau. Ganneth Obeye-
sekere. “Sin and Fear”: The Emergence of a Western
Guilt Culture in the Thirteenth-Eighteenth Centuries. there can be (and often are) conflicts
ford University Press. Carlo Ginzburg. Un-
natural Emotions: Everyday Sentiments on a Micronesian Atoll and Their Challenge
to Western Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press. involves
individuals who are differently socially positioned. E. Bruno Snell. Martin’s Press.” chapter 3 in Writing at the Margin. puts it: older views of culture emphasized its boundedness.
pp. T h e Cult of the Goddess Pattini (Chicago: University of Chicago Press. T h e Dis-
covery of the Mind (in Greek Philosophy and Literature): T h e Greek Origins o f
European Thought (Oxford: Blackwell. and transmission.
1995). gender. Pintupi Self (Washington. Susan Wright (“The Politiciza-
tion of Culture. and global con-
nections. unchanging. and historical aspects. Eric Nicholson (New
York: St. 1986). writing in the
official publication of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ire-
land. but at both local and global levels I use “culture” to mean
symbolic apparatuses of meaning making. 1982). 1983). 41-67. Jackson (Paths) . trans. no.
1 0 The concept of culture has been used in different ways and is hotly debated
in the 1990s both within and without anthropology.
1990). is contested. Michelle Rosaldo. and international
development programs show that its uses are salient as its content. is not closed or coherent. 1980). “The Anthropology of Bioethics. 1988) . Culture and
Experience (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.)
. Managing Turbulent
Hearts: A Balinese Formula f o r Living (Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Knowledge and Passion: Ilongot Notions of Self and
Social Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (See Arthur
Kleinman. 1990). Indeed. it is both shared and contested. : Smithsonian Institu-
tion Press. 1985). but more often in
a manner that strips it of its economic. in the 1990s culture has been taken up in moral debates. ethnicity. Irving Hallowell.

gender. eds. 1997)..
1 2 See. They occupy our attention because they can threaten our
categories.11 So that heterogeneity and complexity define
most social spaces. Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography (Berkeley: Uni-
versity of California Press. George Marcus and Michael Fisher. In
these lectures I will examine one type of danger: the sources. Anthropology as Cul-
tural Critique: A n Experimental Moment in the Human Sciences (Chicago: Uni-
versity of Chicago Press 1986).
Among the things that order the course of the moral processes
I will describe are dangers. matter greatly -such as
status. and Margaret Lock. Mass. 1988) . Arthur Kleinman.g. Mary Steedly. 1993).l2 I select this subject for emphasis because. James Clifford. and to
preserve. even our survival. Literature and Art (Cambridge. our projects.
forms. Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing. Culture in the form of local knowledge and
practices is as much about what is not shared as it is about what is
shared. dangers that are perceived to exist in
the world and that represent serious threats to other things that
are at stake as well.
The Australian sociologist Bryan Turner. relationships. ethnicity. among
many other things -and that what matters has a collective as well
as a personal significance is what provides experience everywhere
with its moral mode. to gain. 1993).
Social Suffering (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. our relationships.
and individuality. for example. distinguishes between the “ontological fra-
. in a theoretical framing I only became
aware of after writing these lectures. The dangers of social experience are multi-
farious. as I define it. Veena Das. ultimate meanings..362 The Tanner Lectures on Human Values
owing to differences of class. Experience is moral. T h e Predicament of Culture:
Twentieth -Century Ethnography. because
it is the medium of engagement in everyday life in which things
are at stake and in which ordinary people are deeply engaged
stake-holders who have important things to lose. resources.: Harvard
University Press. Hanging without a Rope: Narrative
Experience in Colonial and Postcolonial Karoland (Princeton: Princeton University
Press. James Clifford and George
Marcus. 1986) . and consequences of social suffering: a topic that I will
develop at length later. one’s being-in-
the-world and one’s being-unto-death and transcendence. political faction.
11 The ethnographic literature of the 1980s and 1990s is filled with examples
of such differences from communities worldwide: e. In the Realm of the Diamond Queen: Mar-
ginality in an Out -of -the -Way Place (Princeton: Princeton University Press. But that some things do matter.

University of Deakin. In the Western tradition it often
includes strong emphasis on individual rights. But here.” and a search for an acontextual objec-
tivity: a view from nowhere.” pp. Medicalization. moral processes differ in a fundamental way
from ethical discourse. with meta-
theoretical commentary on the authorization and implication of
those principles. The latter is an abstract articulation and
debate over codified values. in
medical ethics for instance. (In bioethics.
beneficence.
. Melbourne. in today’s jargon. and the “social precariousness” that
is the condition of societies. 1998). to counterbalance our society’s famous
romance with progress and sentimentality. even op-
pressive. The latter. and justice. March 25. induces powerful responses from
the state and its institutions that deepen precariousness. in turn. both global
and local. It is conducted by elites. it is so consequential for human conditions globally.13 The result is a lack of emphasis.
rational choice) over affect or behavior and coherence over the
sense of incompleteness and unknowability and uncontrollability
that is so prevalent in ordinary life. the chief principles are autonomy. they in turn privilege informed consent
and confidentiality. Australia. which human commonality
he suggests is responsible for much of sociality.
is a response to ontological frailty and social precariousness that worsens the latter. Joy and humor and imagination can lighten experience
and describe the mundane (and supramundane) in ways that are
just as crucial. “The Anthropology of Bioethics. for example.[KLEINMAN] Experience and Its Moral Modes 363
as we will see. Or at least this is its canonical
form in the Western tradition. personal
communication.
1 3 This analysis of the anthropology of ethics draws upon an extended review in
Arthur Kleinman.
Turner uses this approach to criticize much sociology as “ornamental” and to argue
for a sharedness in experience that results from these elements of sociality as well as
from the interpenetration of worlds and their hybridity (Bryan Turner.
Seen in this light.) Ethical discourse is reflective and intellec-
tualist. emphasizing cognition (more precisely. on solidarity with those who are dis-
advantaged and underserved in Euro-American communities and
gility” of ordinary men and women’s being-unto-death. Ethical discourse is usually principle-based. what has been called
“autonomy unbounded.
This picture of social life may seem overly serious. I seek to emphasize
suff ering and danger. 41-67.

this anthropologically informed philosopher goes so far as to recom-
mend “thick description” as a “suitable appreciation of the contexts and processes of
moral inquiry. Ethics and Social Science in the
Education of Medical Students. 189). 169) and that “no philosophical interpretation of the structure of
moral experience -not even a systematic moral theory -can solve moral problems. But they. Morality and Conflict (Cambridge. “The Challenge of Multiculturalism
in Political Ethics. . But Gut-
mann’s piece is also an example of the way moral theorists construct ethical rela-
tivism as a strawman that is used to limit the seriousness of cultural difference for
moral enquiry. . Mass. as in the Chinese
tradition. albeit a cultural-psychological
one -over principle-guided decisions. All of this sounds congenial for an anthropological approach to moral
theory. her notion of engaged moral inquiry as moral experience
comes close to what I advocate in the last section of the lecture. Concern for respecting cul-
tural difference has repeatedly pointed up the need for ethical dis-
course to project local indigenous alternatives -which anthro-
pologists call ethnoethical formulations -into global framings
(and vice versa). “Bioethics.: Harvard Uni-
versity Press. Rivers Distinguished Lecture in
Social Medicine. principally by virtue of its tendency to encourage self-scrutiny”
(p. aim to be normative. 1983). Stuart Hampshire. and of the means by which moral inquiry helps state the . R. like the canonical
Western tradition. to offer a “should” and a
generalizable “must” about practices. Fieldwork in Familiar Places: Morality. and. And yet while rejecting
standard Anglo-American moral philosophy accounts. but there is still great unclarity about how this is
to be accomplished.
but it can influence the decisions and actions of human beings who contemplate the
implications.364 The Tanner Lectures on Human Values
the poorest non-western societies. they may emphasize the right conduct of the ethically
cultivated person -a character trait.” Philosophy and Public Affairs 22 (1993) : 171-206.: Harvard University Press. Moody-Adams re-
marks: “Although inhabitants of different cultures admittedly have different experi-
ences. 1 2 ) . “More Than Bioethics Alone: Critical
Reflections on the Relationship between Medicine. Moody-Adams
also notes that “moral philosophy always presupposes a kind of interpretive eth-
nography” (p. 170).” First W. as well as Amy Gutmann. Culture and Phi-
losophy (Cambridge.
1 5 Arthur Kleinman. H.
.” She
also insists that “philosophy must give up its claims to moral objectivity or a special
knowledge and must see itself and become part of everyday moral inquiry about ‘the
life worth living and how human beings might attain it’ ” (p. for ex-
ample. they can nonetheless contribute to a cross-cultural moral conversation. 1997). 1998.l4 Indigenous ethical discourses
elsewhere do not always share these goals. A more impressive engagement of moral theory with cultural dif-
ference and cross-cultural disagreements concerning lived values is to be found in
Michele Moody-Adams. claims
and practices claimed to constitute morality” (p.” Certain moral theorists have been particularly
sensitive to the issue of moral particularism and cultural differences: see. Still.15
14 This point is made by Renee Fox. Moody-Adams castigates cul-
tural relativism. Indeed. Harvard Medical School. Mass. March 10.

The sociologic of social
roles and obligations and the exigency of situations and sheer per-
sonal cussedness may override choice. As local worlds become heavily
infiltrated by globalization of the media. may be. of political economy. But. Actions may not
be coherent. they are. a social
space that carries cultural. It is
about positioned views and practices: a view from somewhere and
an action that becomes partisan. At the level of moral processes. Irony. even down-
. what is at stake in a local
world may involve a moral economy of systematic injustice.[KLEINMAN] Experience and Its Moral Modes 365
In contrast to ethical discourse. so that the global discourse on
ethics. at least when it is modeled
as an individual’s rational decision making. and economic specificity. these frustrating com-
plexities are rarely taken up in ethical framings. moral experience is always
about practical engagements in a particular local world. uncertainty. grotesque. but they are
often made indistinguishable by ongoing compromises and nego-
tiations. The infrapolitics of
interpersonal interactions may create conformity. Yes. But like power. from an ethnographic perspective
what is at stake. under globalization moral experience is nonetheless
still about the actualities of specific events and situated relation-
ships. Nor are the pro-
tagonists of ethical discourse and their ethical arguments under-
stood as grounded in particular moral places and processes. Local power relationships refract the force of economic
and political pressure so that some persons are protected while
others are more routinely and thoroughly exposed to the social
violences that everywhere organize everyday life. accommodation and be-
trayal may seem to be different empirical options. and change are the very stuff of moral ex-
perience. corrupt. political. bad
faith. which thrusts particular people to the
edge of social life and nullifies alternatives. And.
paradox. becomes hegemonic about such issues as hu-
man rights. and
of folk and professional culture. to be sure. confuse options.
of course.
and encourage paralyzing perceptions of powerlessness. and even horror. when
viewed in comparative perspective. for example. what morally defines a local world. Relations may be besotted.

The Tenth Circle of Hell: A Memoir of Life in
the Death Camps o f Bosnia (New York: Basic Books. see Kleinman and Kleinman.
For this reason. like most dichotomies
concerning the social world. Valentine Daniel.16 That is to say. of course. My point is not to disparage ethics on behalf
of the moral processes of experience. Ordinary
Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland (New York:
HarperCollins. not less. Indeed. 1997) .l7 And. 1993). Primo Levy. Chen. E. 1997) . to engage the
descriptive ethnographies and social historical materials that make
up moral processes. L.
Inclusiveness here must mean broadening the global discourse
so that it considers other traditions beyond the canonical Western
one and actively engages the local ethical discourse of participants
in a local wor1d.
emerges from the remakes local worlds that need more. this one blurs when we consider the
influence that ethical discourse (local and global) has in informing
moral experience. And. Rezak Hukanovic. interpenetrations. Survival in Auschwitz (New York: Simon and
Schuster.
. 1992). Nancy Scheper-Hughes. “Moral
Transformations”. which clearly have tried to take con-
crete local problems into account. Kleinman. as can be seen in the development of situa-
tional and processual ethics. 1992). just
as the ethical may be irrelevant to moral experience. it now seems to me.366 The Tanner Lectures on Human Values
right inhuman.” in Health and Social Change: A n International Perspective. C. consideration of values in society requires both
approaches as necessarily complementary. ed. “Bioethics”. the moral may be unethical. Death without Weeping: The
Violence o f Everyday Life in Brazil (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of Cali-
fornia Press. the incoherences and fragmentations
that the hybridity. nothing that I have said or will
16 Examples might include those described in Christopher Browning.
17 For examples of what I have in mind with respect to engaging distinctive
cultural traditions and local ethical discourses. Veena Das.
Charred Lullabies: Chapters in an Anthropography of Violence (Princeton: Prince-
ton University Press. Social suffering. and uncertainty of experience
so regularly create are made more coherent and interpretable
through ethical discourse. “Moral Orientations to Suf-
fering. but rather to contribute to a
more inclusive and availing engagement across these related yet
distinctive domains. Contributors to ethical
discourse are working harder.
ethical deliberation. as we will soon see.

“On Torture. Jardine. E. Problems of Suffering in
the Religions o f the World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. During the nineteenth century especially it got
caught up with the ramifying cultural discourse on natural history. animals. 61. 1996]).
. and
Wei Ming Tu. It has.. like the other
Encyclopedists. as in the natural history of plants. 1993). . “Everything That Really Matters. Diderot. Sparry.
Kleinman. science
is the best way to know human nature. claimed : “Human nature is the same everywhere. Mass. inasmuch as it naturalizes
and universalizes ethical decision making. and N. aspiration. cour-
age.l9
Jean de La Bruyère. Behind the excruciating
diversity of cultural contexts and the bewildering inexpediences
of social situations. ” Denis Diderot.”
19 It is not my purpose here to comprehensively review the idea of human
nature. an ancient provenance. 1994) .” And reflecting on human nature from
a comparative cross-cultural perspective that capaciously encom-
passes both Brazilian aboriginal shamans and Parisian academic
mandarins. 1970) . and Degrading Treatment. ed. 285-308. regret. science must therefore
govern ethics and politics. writing in the seventeenth century.
and diseases (see N. respectively. pp. .
it determines everything that matters in human behavior.” 20 In psychology. which increas-
ingly lent to it a biological significance.
Tala1 Asad. ob-
served: “In short.18
An idea of “human nature” often underpins ethical discourse. W. J.: Harvard University Press. they are
yet the same still as they were. eds. 3.
20 The quotations from La Bruyère. in economics. Inhuman. Kleinman. even if Michel Foucault claimed
that in its eighteenth-century form of human nature underwriting the rights of man
it is a historically recent arrival. Claude Lévi-Strauss insists: “the outer differences con-
ceal a basic unity. 1994). pp. Culture of Natural History
[Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press.” in Klein-
man et al.. 24. or Cruel. the claim can be made that human nature pro-
vides a universal basis for ethical standards and actions. . The Living Tree: T h e Changing Meaning of Being Chinese
Today (Stanford: Stanford University Press..:
Harvard University Press. Bowker. Men’s souls and passions change not. of course. and other responses that have an ethical and
religious significance.
A. Ware (Cambridge. in medicine. Mass.[KLEINMAN] Experience and Its M o r a l Modes 367
say about suffering and moral disorder is meant to deny that moral
processes also involve remorse.
and not just in the Western tradition. Secord. transcendence. O n Human Diversity in French Thought (Cambridge. J. endurance. and Lévi-Strauss are cited in
Tzvetan Todorov. Social Suffering.

Nancy C. Wilson. ‘‘ ‘The Big Three’ of Morality (Autonomy. p. C1.’ ” 23
Beyond the Western tradition. one can find uses of the idea of
human nature in ways that are similar to these statements from the
2 1 Leon Kass. the ever ex-
pansive entomologist. See also “From Ants to Ethics: A Biologist Dreams of Unity of
Knowledge. including universal ethical
standards. May 12.
no. . . It is rooted in our moral nature. but rather as the
coming together of “psychology.
argue from a review of the cross-cultural record that moral con-
cerns with autonomy. “The Biological Basis of Morality. and divinity are rooted in hu-
man (or moral) nature. . writing popularly about “the biological basis
of morality.” in A. Putative universals in cross-cultural
perceptions of colors. 3 (1992) : 6-17. preferences in life style. Wilson. experience. Thus. Divinity) and the ‘Big
Three’ Explanations of Suffering. and society” to create
a pan-human moral orientation. and Lawrence
Park. community. O. already cover most facts known about
behavior we term ‘moral.
suffering. 1997). Brandt and P.
2 3 See E.” N e w York Times. O. understand that “na-
ture” not simply as a psychobiological universal. and other psycho-
logical processes have been used by sociobiologists to argue for a
biological basis to human nature and even to claim an evolutionary
source to ethical commitments. in a controversial
essay whose conclusion many anthropologists are likely to contest.22 But Shweder et al.” 21 The cultural psy-
chologist Richard Shweder and his colleagues. Wilson’s polemical statement is based upon the idea of a bio-
logical basis of human nature. 101-18.
22 Richard Shweder. 4 ( 1998) : 53-70. eds. the
physician-moral theorist Leon Kass writes that medical practice
in its engagement with the existential questions of life and death. Community.” claims that “causal explanations of brain activity and
evolution. pp.368 The Tanner Lectures on Human Values
and in other fields the idea of human nature is appropriated as an
essentialized rationale for universals.
. In a rather typical statement from bioethics. 1998. “ ‘I Will Give No Deadly Drug’: Why Doctors Must Not Kill. and solace “is a matter not only of mind and hand but
also of the heart. while imperfect. no. Manamohan Mahapatra. E. not only of intellect and skill but also of char-
acter..” Atlantic Monthly 28. which itself is viewed as the product of gene-culture
co-evolution. Rozin.”
Bulletin of the American College of Surgeons 77. Much. Morality and
Health (New York: Routledge.

once invoked as the source of that unifying hu-
man nature. The front page of the New York Times
of Tuesday. Lau. Uni-
versity College. but the complex emo-
tions of social life.24
Yet biology. C. chapters 3. Senate. see D.” Ph. (Hong Kong: Chinese University Press.D. whose
disagreement with Xunzi over whether human nature is inherently
good or not is fundamental. 1970). and subjectivities
reworking biology to such an extent that the situation of adults
is another case entirely. 5). relationships. The
upper lefthand columns contain a picture of a flood in Elba. “Ching in Chinese Literary Criticism.S. whose investigations of Monica Lewinsky’s allegations
24 For a review of these arguments. The righthand column tells a tale about
Trent Lott. trans. March 10. are ever the same as the pas-
sions of any one man” (Xunzi.
. Thus. the Whitewater independent
counsel. 1998. Thus. the Republican leader of the U. appears to exert such a thin influence in the com-
plexity of human affairs that most of the time it cannot be shown
to be immediately consequential. who is trying
to shift blame from Kenneth Starr. Hong Kong. Mencius. one reads in the Chinese philosophical tradition:
“only those who are rash in their argument would say that human
nature today isn’t what it was in the past” or “the passions of a
thousand men. it was characteristic
of a major stream of the Chinese tradition to relate xing (physi-
cal nature) with qing (emotions) and the moral order. dissertation. Mencius Vol. the middle columns contain an article on a “gruesome”
Serbian atrocity in Kosovo. nonetheless also remarks that all per-
sons possess a number of qualities of human nature and that all
must obey the same laws in moral life. such as remorse and regret. as well
Siu-Kit Wong. 1969. of ten thousand men. The coarse-grained sentiments
of the newborn and toddler may tell us a good deal about psycho-
biological physiology and its genetic bases. Ala-
bama. Oxford. 1
(xiii-xxvii).[KLEINMAN] Experience and Its Moral Modes 3 69
West. are the conse-
quences of crisscrossing meanings.. offers an impressive illustration of
the immense disjuncture between the claims made for what is sup-
posedly known about the biological bases of human nature and
what is actually known about human conditions (Figure 1).

. March 10.FIGURE 1. Front Page. 1998. New York Times.

in light of
the other articles. yet these issues are the very
stuff of what it means to be “human. as well as an essay on the challenges faced by bi-
lingual education in America’s increasingly diverse public schools. D o political violence in the Balkans. but they have
a history. natural disasters and their trau-
matic consequences.
. moral. the
politics of a presidential scandal. Genes would seem to have precious
little to do with the major political.. 289. and teenage pregnancy and infanticide receive their ex-
planation from what the human genome project’s proponents de-
fine as the genetic basis of human identity? I find the claim im-
modest and even ludicrous. Trubner
and Co. a politics. human conditions certainly have a biology. Korean
prisons.”25
2 5 Edvard Westermarck. 1932). “Moral values. multiculturalism. who
Lott demands should now tell “the whole truth. three-
quarters of a century ago. American business. the astonishing title “Mapping the Codes That
Define Humans. p. Paul Trench. to President Bill Clinton.[KLEINMAN] Experience and Its Moral Modes 371
Lott had earlier decried as too slow. almost like the
bottom line “sum” on a restaurant bill.”
Viewed from the decidedly ordinary practices of everyday ex-
perience. economic. and also plea bargaining in the killing of a baby by its teen-
age parents. Indeed affective processes -understood in
these social psychological terms -turn out to be even more con-
sequential for moral processes than cognitive ones -a point made
by the great Finnish anthropologist Edvard Westermarck. is a headline about the cur-
rent status of the human genome project that carries. an economics.” wrote Westermarck. an article on snow and bitter cold in the American Middle
West and their effects on everyday life. the details of an antitrust
case.
“are not abstract but relative to the emotions they express.”
The irony is extreme. and they reflect cultural and
subjective differences. Ethical Relativity (London: K.
Taking up a small space in the lower left column.” Other stories
on page one’s layout include an account of political prisoners in
Korea. and social
issues discussed in the other stories.

many others that are quite distinctive. Encounters. not natural. we might say in the way of
an update. Affect and its biology. There it often seems to be a
means of begging difficult questions. A. J. which I have reviewed elsewhere. “Reproductive Ecology”.
2 7 Ellison. Coady is skeptical as to whether any authoritative testi-
mony can be given at all about human nature. . however. Rethinking
Psychiatry (New York: Free Press.” particular conditions of social life and personal
positioning that contain elements that are shared as well as many. J. Psychobiology.
1992). in social relation-
ships.27 Biology is important. (The Australian philosopher
C. in narratives. Arthur Kleinman and
Anne Becker.26 In other words. and in collective and personal memories. once taken
up in language. does not present the same uni-
formity as the human intellect. even greatly so.” he opined after a review of a then
large cross-cultural literature that today is too vast to review com-
prehensively.
In place of a single “human nature. then. .
. Testimony: A Philosophical Study (Oxford: Clarendon Press.
My purpose here is to draw critical attention to the uses of the
idea of “human nature” in ethics. in symbolic codes. or as I put it earlier. that would
take too extensive a digression to develop here: see Arthur Kleinman.
2 6 This is a rather large subject. but rather local mind-body processes
that are so open to the social world that human conditions are dif-
ferent.” the moral modes of experi-
ence are more appropriately described by a large variety of “hu-
man conditions. Coady. and change as local worlds and our places
in them change. intersubjective. 1988). contribute more to difference than to same-
ness. but in a rather different
way than it is customarily invoked by those who appropriate it as
the grounds for a universal human nature. “Introduction. does not specify a
universal human nature.” in “Sociosomatics”: Psychosomatic Medicine (in press).) 28 It just as often
seeks to authorize the idea of an autonomous naturalized realm of
universals that can be objectively assessed independent of culture. moral processes are simultaneously social
and subjective. Lock.
28 C. A.372 The Tanner Lectures on Human Values
“The emotional constitution .

to
talk about the intentions of policy makers and the legal language
of programs.
30 The most impressive case for these effects is found in David Harvey. fostered the corporatization of profes-
sional work and the infiltration of technical rationality into all
aspects of domestic lifeworlds. or economics.
The latest phase of finance capitalism has created unprecedented
space and time compression. Health and Social Changes. Culture of Natural History. for instance. products. For the ethnographer like the
social historian. On the question
of the cultural history of nature. dissolved established value systems
and social organizations.. see Jardine et al. changes that are remaking both the global and the local. and culture. in these lectures I take my responsibility to
develop the case for experience. rather than the unjust distribution of human prob-
lems and resources. 1990).
Moral experience. is an impossibility when we use the socially
grounded concept of actual “human conditions. collective
processes.29 That asocial abstraction. possesses a genealogy just as it does a
locality.”
Because I find that concern with ethical discourse far predomi-
nates over an orientation to moral experience in programs in
values and society.[K LEINMAN ] Experience and Its Moral Modes 373
politics. One thing that a focus on experi-
ence entails is concern for change. and subjectivity. and lifestyles. it is crucial to understand how moral experience changes
under the interactions between cultural representations. in order to specify a local world and its transfor-
mations. interactions that are in turn shaped by
large-scale changes in political economy. then. See also the chapters
. see the different positions of
Amartya Sen and myself in Chen et al. accelerated commodification of cul-
tural processes. The
Condition of Postmodernity (Cambridge: Blackwell. local worlds have been dis-
29 O n the contested issue of objectivity and measurements of attitudes and
values relating to an autonomous realm of nature.30 As a result. politics. and because my own professional positioning
prepares me to do so. technology.. authorized entirely new aesthetics.
Ours clearly is an era of the most pronounced transnational
changes. and intensified
“volatility” and “ephemerality” of style. re-
lationships. which is so help-
ful to those who would restrict the idea of justice.

as we will soon see. 1991).
Indeed. eds.
. 1995). genocide. marginalized. and runaway adoles-
cents and broken families There is also better understanding
on social and cultural change in Eric Hobsbawn.”
31 Robert Desjarlais et al. Social suffering has always been a
disquieting part of human conditions. both the three-sided set of local interactions among repre-
sentations. and the immense disparity of the life ways of the well-
to-do and the truly poor. and subjectivity and the influence
on it of the broader social forces I have described must be taken
into account.
but also millions of young Asian. disability. and Eastern European
women sold into prostitution -as astonishing a figure as it is -
may not mean that much on a day-to-day basis in a North Ameri-
can suburb. and
premature death. and brought under enormous
global. but we are today -thanks
to global media coverage -made more intensely and regularly
aware of the anguish and destruction of war. 1994). suicide. W o r l d Mental Health (New York and Oxford:
Oxford University Press. remade. That there are 200 million enslaved people in
the world -mostly children forced to work in awful sweatshops. crime. suf-
fering mutates as do our responses to it. T h e Global City (Princeton: Princeton
University Press. African. especially financial and marketing. but high rates of domestic violence. structural
violence. influence. Recent illustration of an extreme kind is given in a special
issue of the New York Times Magazine (March 8. substance
abuse.3 74 The Tanner Lectures on Human Values
mantled. collective processes. T h e Age of Extremes (New York:
Vintage. For example. Out of those interactions. sexually transmitted diseases. so that
those in extreme poverty-approximately 20 percent of the world’s
population -bear much higher rates of sickness. 1998) on “Business Class as a
Way of Life.. among the dangers that absorb the practical attention
of ordinary men and women toward social experience are the
varieties of human suffering. as well as Saskia Sassen. You no longer need to be an expert in
public health or social development to know that disease and death
are unequally and unjustly distributed in communities.
to understand the changing forms of suffering and responses to
them.

and also the stark reality of end-of-life care. even in an era of self-
pronounced material prosperity. because they are among the most
frequent and widespread of contingent misfortunes.
.[KLEINMAN] Experience and Its Moral Modes 375
that policies and programs aimed at controlling these problems can
contribute to and even intensify the misery. throw in the congenital and acquired disabilities and the
fear of peculiar genetic vulnerability to diseases that cluster in
families. Veena Das. and the danger social suffer-
ing poses to ordinary human conditions.
add the threat of particular risk factors from moles to cholesterol
levels. and im-
migrant and refugee programs. of the contemporary sensibility
that social policies and programs are part of social suffering. drug enforcement. along with failed public
housing.” in Socia1
Sufferings.
Among the varieties of suffering that will concern us. welfare. and fear of impotence and of iatro-
genesis. Parkinson’s disease. “Introduction. and the hun-
dreds of other common chronic illnesses from arthritis to psoriasis. teenage pregnancy. diabetes. add injury and trauma from vehicular collisions and from
work and household accidents. The frightening implications of a huge number of
inner city youth (many of them African American and Hispanic)
incarcerated in prisons is but one example. cancers.32 And there is vague if
widely held recognition that commercialism contributes to the
sordidness. and you have
illustration enough from just this one realm of misfortune of why
32 Arthur Kleinman. illness
and injury are also important. dementia. Read through
a list of serious acute and chronic disorders from life-threatening
infectious diseases to heart disease. of being let go before a retirement
pension becomes operative. becomes all too real. stroke. of being unable to make a go of it
as a single working mother or a retired widow. of ending up in a
dead-end job without benefits.
emphysema. of being uninsured or underinsured for
health problems and injuries. Add
to this the fear of downward social mobility. depression. or for that matter
as anyone marginal to the information technology that is the lead-
ing edge of economic opportunity. and Margaret Lock.

I’ve had it
happen several times in my life so I should be prepared. The Illness Narratives (New York: Basic Books. and . Even in your body. But
the only preparation is to be wary . . all the time. . even in the family. And now my heart problem. I’ve been in a bad.
LECTURE I. in the real-life local places where people live in the face
of dangers.
-52-year -old unemployed executive from N e w York City
with serious coronary artery disease
My grandfather told it to my father during the Warlord
Period. I’ve
been laid off after 20 years with one firm. THE DANGER OF SOCIAL EXPERIENCE:
SUFFERING IN LOCAL A N D GLOBAL PERSPECTIVES
You grow up in our [American] society and you kind of
get lulled into the view that you are protected. real and imagined.
bad car accident. 1988). in the space of human
problems. in the
neighborhood.
. and
you come to see just how dangerous things are. grave and minor. mesh in the close en-
counters of ordinary men and women with pain and disaster and
with the infrapolitics of power that apportion those threats un-
equally and distribute responses to them unfairly across the social
fault lines in actual worlds. .
W e stand in the thick of human experience. My father told it to me during the war with the Japa-
33 Arthur Kleinman. That’s why
over time you stay very attentive to things at work.376 T h e Tanner Lectures on Human Values
social experience -for all our use of euphemisms. and perhaps also of why
that sense is so troubling that it is routinely disguised and denied. Then something happens. desire and obligation.33
Here then is the social terrain where I will lodge these lectures. Maybe even more dangerous than
I’m willing to admit. Here is where
fear and aspiration.
You can take life easy. statistical and
metaphoric -carries a sense of danger. . I’ve experienced the death of a daughter to
suicide related to drugs. The
world is a dangerous place. things are easy.

The world is not the same.and most micro-processes. but rather in the mediating medium I described earlier as an
intersubjective level of words. we are well aware of the social consequences
of these experiences. They are
both outside and inside the person.
Thus. images. feel-
. both social and subjective. there are public and private spaces at the
level of the most macro. are faced by individuals in networks. along with the requirement for practical engage-
ment with them. even while at the same time we cannot be cer-
tain what their distinguishing cultural meanings and subjective
feelings are like.
This is not because these experiences are natural or universal in
some banal sense. And I told it to my son and daughter during the Cul-
tural Revolution. meanings. but because.
-68-year -old Chinese intellectual from Beijing
These two excerpts from research interviews in two very dif-
ferent social spaces are chosen to illustrate the emphasis I have
given to the sheer practical relevance of ordinary experience and
its orientation around an acute appreciation of local dangers.
But social life is always very dangerous. gestures. There
is not much question in either instance about what matters and
why what matters absorbs the concern of members of a local
world.
These dangers. and why social suffering is perceived as dangerous. H e understood it. they break down the sharp dichotomy between public and
private spaces.
The excerpts also illumine the intersubjectivity of experience. Even in these prosperous times I’m sure my
daughter tells my granddaughter: be careful! Be very careful!
Times change. History changes. Nor can there be much question about why these dangers
are threatening. But much of
lived experience in a local world occurs not in that realm of policy
deliberation versus the deepest strata of innermost dreams and ter-
rors.[KLEINMAN] Experience and Its Moral Modes 377
nese. but what could he do? H e
was murdered. given the finite number of ways of
being human owing to the constraints of social life (including
social psychobiological processes creating certain practical limits in
human conditions). Surely.

378 The Tanner Lectures on Human Vulues

ings, engagements with and amongst others, including others with
whom we are in long-term, even intimate interactions as well as
those who pass through our lives obliquely and infrequently, yet
with real impact.
Our felt experience of the flow of lived time and space is both
part of the intersubjective stream of cultural practices and social
engagements and part of our inner being. Symbolic forms - lan-
guage, music, cultural images -belong to both the social world
of values and the interior world of feelings. They link norms with
emotions, creating mediating processes that I call sociosomatic.34
I have, at various times, used the image of a tidal stream to convey
the interpenetration of the moral and the emotional, the social and
the subjective. Experience, like a tidal stream, washes in among
the feelings of inner life and rushes out among values, norms, and
relationships. Moreover, as fresh water and salt water intermingle
but also maintain their own forms in a tidal stream, so too do sub-
jective and collective processes create a mediating world of inter-
subjectivity while still at times possessing their own characteristics.
Social theorists have used different metaphors to capture this basic
ethnographic and social historical understanding. Theorists have
innovated new terms or revitalized old ones to express this mediat-
ing quality of human conditions. Traditional Chinese thought is
not the only non-western tradition also to describe lived experi-
ence as intersubjective interaction-notably, renqing quanxi, social
connections and their affective dynamics -but because thinkers in
that tradition (like those in many other non-western traditions)
were not steeped in mind-body dualism the dichotomy between
body and society did not weigh as heavily on them as it has in the
West. Therefore, thoroughgoing interpenetration between the
world of values and the world of feelings was not a notion in a
marginal intellectual stream but a canonical orientation in the
Chinese tradition. That is to say, in traditional Chinese orienta-
tions society, body, and self are in constant relationship so that one
34 Kleinman and Becker, “Introduction.”

[KLEINMAN] Experience and Its M o r a l Modes 379

can speak of moral-somatic and moral-emotional processes: what
I am calling today the moral modes of experience.35
That things actually at stake in the social world are intercon-
nected with what is felt to be at stake in one’s innermost being
does not mean that what is involved is a process of social replica-
tion. The relationship between moral engagements and moral
sentiments has been described as dialectical, open-ended, and in-
determinante. As James Scott has shown, the inner transcript of a
person may remain hidden because it resists the dominant public
transcript in the infrapolitics of a village, where its open expres-
sion can injure that person, and we may extend his analysis to a
social movement or a business organization. 36 Personal obsession
with a perceived threat may seem to have little to do with collec-
tive concerns; nonetheless, even an idiosyncratic fear may begin
from collective suspicions and surely also may feedback to re-
inforce or call into question the authenticity of those public worries.
What gives our local worlds their immense power to absorb
our attention so as to direct our action, sometimes even away from
personal interests, into collective projects and thereby force con-
formity or pressure one to contest and resist local conditions has to
do with the character of danger at the core of interpersonal en-
gagement that imparts a legitimate sense of threat to what is most
at stake. W e fear that what we hold dearest could be seriously
menaced, even lost entirely. Loss of a world, through forced up-
rooting or massive historical transition, produces a collective feel-
ing akin to grief, a cultural bereavement. Feelings of menace can
be a powerfully motivating force for violent actions, as when they
are whipped up for political purposes into a frenzy of ethnic na-
tionalist conflict. Feelings of menace occur also in the most deeply
personal ways, as when we feel alienated from what was formerly

35 Kleinman and Kleinman, “Moral Transformations of Health and Suffering”;

at stake for us and fear that we will float, disoriented, without a
clear stake in things. One may perceive such a fundamental divide
between personal and social orientations that one develops basic
distrust in one’s local world. One fears being overcome by others,
forced to betray inner secrets of such vital significance that one
panics over being thoroughly lost or compromised without them.
Over time passionate commitment to a social cause later shown to
be unworthy or worse can yield a deep disquiet of misplaced loy-
alty. The absence of that sense of threat or betrayal can impart
a feeling of comfort with one’s living condition, a sense of success
in having crossed over to safety. Joy may arise as much from that
sense of liberty as from its opposite: the resonant feeling of be-
longing to a community of shared faith and practice. Either way,
these are the moral-emotional dynamics of experience.
Ethnographers have also shown that trance and possession
states, rather than alienating members from their social groups,
as a form of personal pathology, frequently offer an authorized
channel for conveying personal problems, criticism, and accusa-
tion into collective space so that they are made more acceptable
and can be acted Alternatively, this cultural psychology chan-
nel of what we now call dissociation can be seen to make available
to individuals a language and a voice that appropriate collective
fears as authenticated subjective realities. Hence we get two-way
traffic: the social world haunts the person with personified dan-
gers ; the individual animates a legitimate social strategy to express
individual doubt and desire collectively. Thus, authorized mythol-
ogy about demons, witches, and other forms of malign influence
(e.g., today perhaps early childhood traumas or the threat of en-
vironmental pollution) becomes verified states of personal being:
37 Among others, this point is illustrated in the ethnographic descriptions of

. 1995) .[KLEINMAN] Experience and Its Moral Modes 381
cultural epistemology becomes local ontology. 199S). and. . Rewriting the Soul: Multiple Personality and
the Sciences o f Memory (Princeton: Princeton University Press. multiple chemical sensitivities may be
our contemporary examples. 122. Second-
century Christian discourse fashioned a self that was centered
around suffering. . 38 Multiple per-
sonalities.”
Psychosomatic Medicine 54 (1992) : 546-60. 1995).
39 Norma Ware and Arthur Kleinman.23. and
subjectivity intersect and change under the impress of the large-
scale transformations in politics and economics that define an era
or a place. chronic fatigue. the experiential world.
I have said that to understand historical changes and cultural
differences in this dynamic field of local experience we need to
understand how cultural representations.
.
40 Judith Perkins. .: Princeton
University Press. like memory and emotion. As one historian of religion puts it: “Thus
discourse created a new paradigm for understanding suffering and
death. Ian Hacking. connects a particular
outward shape of the social world to particular inward forms of
the body-self : in Bryan Turner’s arresting terms. then.39 The psychophysiological process of
dissociation. . collective processes. Suff ering became a religious identification with
divinity and a political alternative to the Stoic persona that was a
key representation of the self for Romans (for whom suffering
was not a virtue). . I will illustrate this process of change and difference in
modes of moral experience with respect to suffering and lay and
professional responses to it. consequently.”40
38 See Allan Young. pp. T h e Suffering Self: Pain and Narrative Representation in the
Early Christian Era (London: Routledge. “Culture and Somatic Experience. together with the em-
phasis on the resurrected body. Things that
had universally been thought bad and contemptible were suddenly
seen as valuable. N. T h e Harmony of Illusions (Princeton. display the subversive underpin-
nings of this discourse. “ontological
frailty” and “social precariousness” change in relation to each
other and in relation to changing societal responses (see note 1 2 ) . This empowerment.
The early Christian era provides a serviceable example.J.

reviewing the major themes
. self. the social marginality of certain
groups of women. pp.: Harvard University Press. and Daniel
Goldhagen. and see David
Apter and Tony Saich. perhaps. moral
fears about the threat of sexuality. Ordinary Men. and the institutional support of
civil authority had disappeared. 1996). Consider the possibility that the
Nazi era in Germany. and subjective structure of experience. Revolutionary Discourse in Mao’s Republic (Cambridge. De-
cember 4. and personal memory and affect that
created a terrifying form of interpersonal experience in European
towns and villages that had dire consequences for many.
but the experiential reality that featured and realized fear of
witches. on Nazi Germany and the Holocaust. February 19. Social Suffering.
and Mao’s Cultural Revolution in China as well.
“Bosnia: ‘The Great Betrayal. 1997. The en-
tire cluster of representation.42 Are the dif-
41 Norman Davies.
‘I
pp. February 5. 566-67.
Historical studies of witch burning in the medieval period tell
a story of a transformation in subjectivity as well. inquisitional practices. 1997. and Wei-Ming Tu.. 1996). 1998. and the development of new
religious institutions reveal a reorganization of cultural representa-
tions. 1994) . The new subjective self took institutional form around
the organized collection of funds. “Destructive Will and
Ideological Holocaust: Maoism as a Source of Social Suffering in China.382 The Tanner Lectures on Human Values
This was no more and no less than a transformation in sub-
jectivity. administration of hospitals and
poorhouses. on Maoist political violence. November 20. March 26.’ N e w York Review of Books. albeit in distinctive ways and with varying
degrees of success. church politics. and his other pieces on Bosnia in the N Y R B . as the
Cambodian genocide and more recently Bosnia’s ethnic cleansing
might support similar analysis of the transformation of the politi-
cal. collective processes. Europe: A History (Oxford and New York: Oxford Uni-
versity Press. and institutions became a ve-
hicle of political power. 1998. and experiences of religious transformation. Stalin’s era of terror in the Soviet Union.41 By the
turn of the Enlightenment not only was witch burning proscribed.
Mass.” in A.
42This kind of argument is made. Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust
(New York: Knopf. moral. and Mark Danner. The circle of
religious obsession with sin and with the role of the devil.
Kleinman et al. 1998. in such works as those of Browning. 40-52.

Genealogies of Religion.
Pain and suffering. and spiritual redemp-
tion. a sign of impaired virtue.
In Colonial New England.
. no gain” mentality of
our sports culture because it appropriates such a thin and limited
and nontranscendent notion of suffering. a thoroughly bad thing. as the social
anthropologist Tala1 Asad argues ?43 In the same historical period.. Charred Lullabies. Even the experiential realities
of old age and dying have been reorganized to emphasize that
of the leading works on Serbian atrocity in Bosnia. I explicitly exclude here the “no pain. family. eds. and Daniel. reflection.. Violence and Subjectivity (Berkeley: University of California Press. prayer.[KLEINMAN] Experience and Its Moral Modes 383
ferences in sense and sensibility in different eras simply an example
of identifying key features in these changing structures ? Humilia-
tion in the Middle Ages of Christian theological hegemony: was
it a means of creating loving obedience as a virtue so as in turn to
create subjects appropriate to that time and place. the popular culture and leading social in-
stitutions support a fundamentally different mode of experience.
where I live and work. disdain for bodily pain and valuing of suffering
of the self (or soul) as a salvational practice. are dealt with as if
they were without positive value. an
occasion for salvation. Puritan modes of experiencing suf-
fering emphasized discipline.
in press). moral regeneration.
43 Asad. especially chronic forms. workplace. The salvific potential
of suffering is at an all-time low.) No one is expected any-
more to merely endure pain and suffering. The methods for so-
cializing children and the societal institutions that support moral
meanings and practices do not reward endurance of misery or ac-
ceptance of the limits of repair and rescue.
we can also easily see that suffering was organized into something
profoundly different than it is in Western Europe or North Amer-
ica today: namely. Theology and moral practices and bodily
sensibility were supported by the community’s key institutions:
church. Suffering was a test of faith. and the positive virtues of
self-negation. school. See also the chapters in Veena
Das et al. (Sotto
voce. In New England in the 1990s.

1992). The
same commercial processes that sell suffering at a distance. soul. “On Torture”. 1993). the Dis-
may of Images: Cultural Appropriations of Suffering in Our Times. O n Human Diversity. Rivers Lecture. for an account of risk. and policy analysis that is the dom-
inating global technical rationality of our times projects the idea
that all forms of suffering are manageable.
community-based studies give a more nuanced understanding.44 The mix
of technology. and society. for more on the latter. compare with Luc Boltanski. see Ulrick
Beck. 1993). H . La misère du monde (Paris: Editions
du Seuil. When the pope.
This characterization of distinctive eras is necessarily crude .” 46 Or
perhaps what is truly ominous is that our political economy.” Daedulus 125. if in no other way then
by insurance and forecasting. legal procedure. La souffrance à distance (Paris:
Métailie. via
advertising. see also Nicholas Christakis.
no. deny that anyone need experience suffering up close -
all one need do is buy something to relieve the pain. 1998.” paper presented W. In a
study of AIDS and poverty in rural Haiti at the outset of the HIV
pandemic. and with Pierre Bourdieu. 1 (1996): 1-23. 45 Perhaps this disguise is what Mon-
tesquieu had in mind when he observed “the truth would be a ter-
rible one. prognosis. p. which is seen as extraneous. especially those used to describe human adversities.
45 Asad. no longer
a necessary part of these terminal realities. forthcoming. and we should have to conceal it from ourselves.
46 Cited in Todorov. “The Self-fulfilling Proph-
ecy in Medicine. even commodifies this sobering self-reflection. R. and forecasting in medicine
as well as risk and forecasting in society generally.
quaintly out of keeping with the words used by the globalized
media.
Here the cross-cultural record of ethnography can be cited. a safe
distance. they seem almost anachronistic. “The Appeal of Experience. 365. Risk Society: Towards a N e w Modernity (London: Sage Publications. visit-
ing Cuba for the first time in January 1998. and the end of living can be so managed as to
avoid or minimize suff ering. Harvard Medical
School.
. for example. Paul Farmer shows how both the local cul-
ture of blame and the global discourse of accusation that pointed a
finger at Haitians as the supposed source of AIDS at the time led
44 Arthur Kleinman and Joan Kleinman.384 The Tanner Lectures on Human Values
pain. uses the words of suffer-
ing of self. disability.

. an emotional survival strategy. No Aging in India (Berkeley: University of California
Press. 1998).
.” 50 The research
that Joan Kleinman and I conducted in Hunan among survivors
of China’s vastly destructive Cultural Revolution showed how
three common symptoms -dizziness.’’ Anne Becker’s research in rural Fiji suggests that a consistent
pattern of social support for women during and after pregnancy. exploring fear as a way of life among Mayan villagers dur-
ing Guatemala’s era of terror in the 1980s. pain -acted as
4 7 Paul Farmer. 1995). to
the political repression they have experienced. India. makes the experience of
postpartum depression virtually absent in Fiji. AlDS and Accusation: The Geography of Blame in Haiti
(Berkeley: University of California Press. The upshot is a
socially constructed yet locally experienced epidemic of “demen-
tia.
48 Lawrence Cohen. 2
(1994) : 227-56.” Current Anthropology 9. observes that “mem-
ories of horror are experienced as bodily complaints by widows
and others as a moral response. “Fear as a Way of Life.47 Lawrence
Cohen’s field research in Benares.
50 Linda Green. no. fatigue. Self and Society (Philadelphia: University of Pennsyl-
vania Press. . .
quite different than in North America.
49 Anne Becker. shows that dementia of
the aged was earlier neither culturally marked as an experience of
suffering nor understood by family members or professionals as a
reason for medical (or religious) intervention?48 All that is chang-
ing. the teeming humanity of this rich ethnography reveals.[KLEINMAN] Experience and Its Moral Modes 385
to a figuring of the problem in which victims -usually poor rural
women -were routinely accused and societal responses to their
suffering both minimized their need and blunted their agency be-
cause of huge differences in political-economic power. Linda
Green. 1992). as
geriatrics emerges as a professional field in India and as the global
media present lifestyle alternatives that lead to marketing innova-
tions that change local attitudes to the elderly. Body.49 Here cultural rep-
resentations and collective processes remake the psychobiology of
subjective experience to prevent this form of suffering.

52
Shigehisa Kuriyama notes. T h e Expression of the Body: T h e Divergence of Greek
and Chinese Medicine (New York: Zone Books. p. that “tension” in
earlier times in Western history was a “prized virtue.” New Lit-
erary History 25 (1994). xiv) configures social experience generally this “structure of con-
juncture” involves “the practical realization of cultural categories in a specific his-
torical context. Michael Herz-
feld ( T h e Poetics of Manhood: Contest and Identity in a Cretan Mountain Village
[Princeton: Princeton University Press. Once upon a time. ex-
haustion. for example. But clearly the cross-
cultural picture is a lot more complex.
5 2 As Marshall Sahlins (Islands of History [Chicago: University of Chicago
Press. where “it almost invariably signals anxiety and
alarm. including
the microsociology of their interaction.” 53 He goes on to comment on its altered
meaning today. 19851) shows that tension is highly valued
and cultivated. In Greece today. in press). for example. Many other ethnographic studies
add support to the notion that distinctive cultural representations
of suffering and processes of socializing people as sufferers (and
as healers) constitute and express different collective and subjec-
tive experiences of suffering (or its opposite). now it speaks of distress. 1985].51 These
symptom symbols authorized alternative history and disguised in-
tersubjective remembering of political criticism and social resent-
ment and moral recrimination.386 The Tanner Lectures on Human Values
bodily metaphors of collective and subjective disorientation. “How Bodies Remember. and names
a source of sickness. as expressed in the interested action of the historic agents. Kuriyama associates the banishment of
vitalism from science and medicine in the West and the use of
tension and pressure as social metaphors to talk about “the de-
mands of a competitive marketplace.
it declared the power of life. and hurt in that exceptionally dangerous time. In earlier eras baro-
metric pressure in the air was seen to correlate with vitality or its
diminution in the body. the pace of modern life.”
5 3 Shigehisa Kuriyama.” Kuriyama relates the change to both a pro-
fessional and popular change in understanding what atmosphere is
and how it relates to health and sickness.” and
their health effects on the person with a change not only in dis-
51 Arthur Kleinman and Joan Kleinman. 707-23.
. tenseness announced vigor and health. a quality to
be sought and cultivated.” creating a “relation between a happening
and a structure (or structures) .

1983). and
the medical are inseparable.
ed. is a different
sensibility that results from a particular cultural constitution of
experience. and social institutions such as medicine and business elabo-
rates a distinctive experiential world that includes different sensa-
tions. one in which the moral. “Introduction”.
blood pressure. Like tension
and pressure in the West in earlier centuries. In keeping with the analysis
advanced in this lecture.: Harvard University Press.54 Other research demon-
strates the local patterning of hormonal. among many other relevant works that illustrate.” The interaction of psychobiology. Unhealthy Societies: T h e Afflictions of
Inequality (New York and London: Routledge. such a local biology could also be referred
to as a moral biology. and im-
munological responses to distinctive social conditions. as well as Anne Harrington. the political.
Many have been utterly amazed by ordinary people’s overt reaction
54 Margaret Lock. and variation in physiological parameters such as heart rates. T h e Placebo Effect (Cambridge. variation in mortality and morbidity with religious affilia-
tion and religiosity. Indeed.55
There is also intriguing evidence that in our own times in the
West self-expression of the deepest kind has increasingly become
a public performance that would have astonished our forebears. and differences in the common sense
understanding of what they signify with respect to health and
disease.. different sensibility. or T-cell levels across sociodemographic groups. Mass. Peltt. cultural dis-
course.
5 5 Ellison. the effect of
bereavement on mortality. cardiovascular. and qi may be taken as examples
of “local biology.[KLEINMAN] Experience and Its Moral Modes 387
course but in the experience of health and suffering. 1993).. 1997). qi (vital energy) in
the Chinese cultural tradition. Social Psychophysiology (New York: Guilford. the result of such historical change is a particular
cultural organization of body-self-society processes or in other
words: a distinctive local biology. and
John Cacioppa and R. Pressure. see
also list of references in Richard Wilkinson. and responses to menopause among
Japanese and North American women. tension. Encounters with Aging: Mythologies of Menopause in Japan
and North America (Berkeley: University of California Press. Kuriyama suggests. Anthropological studies in support of
this point include notably Margaret Lock’s demonstration of dis-
tinctive symptoms. eds. Kleinman and Becker. “Reproductive Ecology”. for instance. 1996) .
. meanings.

Yes. and complex emotions
that emphasizes privacy and continence and elaborate sensitivities that have little to
do with the way they are portrayed in the recent film version as overt.
1997. he loved his
students. provides telling evidence of the way historical
changes in subjectivity allow for people’s selective memory and forgetting and there-
fore for renarratizing in 1997’s Russia how experience was lived in the 1950s and
1960s in the Soviet Union. and other complex emotions. may be “now real only if we are seen having
them?”:57 if “human nature” can be so malleable owing to chang-
ing times and circumstances you can appreciate why I question this
overused concept (and the ways it is employed) . our alleged moral compass.
58 Julia Raiskin. and rather coarsely functional sentiments. But he was one hell of a bastard. single-
dimensional. 1902). I was his graduate student. that is true. H e had these
awful squinty eyes and if you disagreed with anything he said he would
. outed performances of arousal.” New York Times. most indirect. and perhaps also a thinning out and simplifying of
grief. which. in his “Preface“ to the novel The Wings of the Dove (New
York: Scribner and Sons. Here is an exchange between her and two Russian psy-
chotherapists talking about the late Professor Andrei Snezhnevsky. describes the sensibility of the character of his age
in an extraordinary depiction of the subtlest.58
56 Henry James. but that portrayal of the world in recent movies like
The Wings of the Dove makes it over into something much more
akin to the way we are Our globalized age of talk shows. September 7. “Grief on Demand. shame. and glamour world photojournalism sponsors a different
subjectivity of self-disclosure. E17. as we will now see. who played a key
role in the political abuse of Soviet psychiatry:
Psychotherapist A: “I knew him. why I insist that
our subjectivities are not fixed any more than is our social circum-
stance or. Sunday. conducting an ethnography of a psychiatric telephone consulta-
tion service in Moscow in 1997. Not only does the inhibited and deeply private sensi-
bility that characterizes Henry James’s paradigmatic depiction of
upper-middle-class Victorian Britons and Americans describe a dif-
ferent world.388 The Tanner Lectures on Human Values
of deep emotionality in the public display of private grief that fol-
lowed the death of Princess Diana.
5 7 Adam Phillips. But should we be so surprised ?
Clearly we have passed over into a new era: one in which the
highly proclaimed emotional continence of British society of the
past (itself something of a cultural stereotype) has given way to
its opposite. p.
sit coms. as one commen-
tator wondered. vicar-
ious suffering.

”
Psychotherapist A: “Somewhere. trauma from
just throw this awful look in your direction.
59 Arthur Kleinman.”
Psychotherapist B: “It’s better than Siberia. it is a category like any
other.)
(Julia Raiskin. Ay. She was the head of a whole department at the KGB Hospital. or put differently. and Lock. and Margaret Lock: “Introduction. Harvard University. experiences of diseases. Some are really sluggish
schizophrenics. I am going to do some work.
Department of Anthropology.”
(She walks out and heads for her cubicle.
.”
Psychotherapist B: “It was not the KGB! It was many years ago. She will tell you all about sluggish. he did a lot for the diagnosis of schizophrenia. a diagnosis used to label
dissidents.”
Psychotheraist B: “For God’s sake.]”
Julia Raiskin: “What do you think about that as a diagnosis?”
Psychotherapist A (pointing at Psychotherapist B ) : “She would know a lot
about that. dying.[KLEINMAN] Experience and Its Moral Modes 389
T HE M ORAL EPIDEMIOLOGY OF SOCIAL SUFFERING
I N A DISORDERING AGE
Suffering can be called “social” in several senses. or just to spend a few months in a hospital and then come out and
live a normal life?”
Psychotherapist A : “You call that a normal life? Your whole life you are on
the same insane registry. 1998)
One can see here the way memory and forgetting first suppress and then revivify
former kinds of subjectivity and being-in-the-world (as professional collaborators in
the police state) that now are neither acceptable nor experienced as real anymore. enduring. Senior Honors Thesis.” in Klein-
man.”
Psychotherapist B: “It was a diagnosis like any other. she was. in what ways can
suffering -the experience of going through. Social Suffering. and that means no work. with the sluggish [schizophrenia. or tran-
scending pain and tribulation -be considered social? To begin
with. but he went
too far. bereavement. in a
disordering time we can speak of the moral epidemiology to which
findings on social suffering contribute. H e was not half bad a scien-
tist either. Somewhere there must have been misdiagnosis. Das. I am sure you
sent away a few yourself.
You call scientists’ street sweeping a life? I would rather go to Siberia.”
Psychotherapist A: “She was. chapter 3. Veena Das. Leave me alone. Of course.59 Their com-
bined significance is to give emphasis to the idea that social suf-
fering can be an index of moral disorder. just leave me alone. no traveling abroad. You have to agree that
no reasonable person would have opened his mouth in those years. just for-
get it. do you really think it is better for someone to be sent to Siberia for
life. their symptoms and all. Any-
way. First. right there under your nose.

61 Kleinman. what is most
at stake may be suffering itself and responses to it. After thirty
years of working with patients with chronic illness. and the more I fear them. and the professionals who help them. asthma. it is clear that suffering itself
is intersubjective.
Think of Alzheimer’s disease in an elderly woman. I am turned into a pent-in egoist. many others is
in the intersubjective space between the demented patient and her
closest family members. But as James’s own illness experience actually shows. .
diabetes. My eyes are dry and hollow. In that intersubjective space. depression. I have forgotten. at least as constructed in the West (in this instance his disease). 296). “I find
myself in a cold. etc. and in end-of-life care. and most other chronic conditions
evoke an interpersonal experience.390 The Tanner Lectures on Human Values
natural catastrophes.61
60 The powerful entailment of the Western tradition’s emphasis on the indi-
viduality of suffering can lead even such a dialectical theorist as William James to
focus solely on the sick person. having in my
spiritual make-up no rescuing resources adapted to such a situation” (cited in Simon. made more compelling in his case by his recognition
that illness. heart disease. suffering is taken
up in engagement with what matters most. . my breast and body feel as if stale and
caked. . my facial muscles won’t
contract. the more I
think about them.
the locus of suffering in this instance and in many. the mother of
three adult children with families of their own. his
was as intersubjective an engagement with body and death as it is possible to imag-
ine. their family
caregivers. The increasing
pain and misery of more fully developed disease -the disquiet. the final strangula-
tion. my throat quivers.60 In bereavement. in business failure accompanied by un-
employment. Indeed. my heart flutters. and violence are most often intersubjective. p. and frustration. . really forgotten that mass of this world’s joyous facts
which in my healthful days filled me with exultation about life. quaking state when I think of the probability of dying
soon with all my music in me. I have come to
the strong impression that most of the time cancer. fre-
quently isolates and self-absorbs the sick person to an inordinate degree. beyond a doubt. I fear them. a relational style of suffering. Their mother may
have such devastating cognitive impairment that she can neither
recognize them nor realize the degree of her own disability. begin to haunt me. loss. with family and friends deeply involved. pinched. Where is
the experience of suffering ? Contrary to our pronounced Western
ideological tendency to emphasize the tragedy of a single person. . . Yet
they are overcome by their hurt.. in domestic violence
with family breakdown.
Genuine Reality. T h e I llness Narratives
.

in low-income societies.62 A leading hypothesis is that these conditions are
more adequately configured as forms of social suffering that result
from massive political. and rather different. and
suicide are on the increase in many areas of the world. many neuropsychiatric disorders. World Mental Health.” it
is not unreasonable to consider current global political economic
and cultural transformations as disordering. and cultural changes of our era
of triumphal global capitalism. 1996 (Geneva. Illicit drug and alcohol abuse. rich and
poor alike.
64 World Health Report.. The World Health Organization ( W H O ) calls
poverty the greatest killer and maimer of people. and the health problems associ-
ated with such use. and in this sense is a
moral indicator of cultural or societal disorder. and because that pandemic
does not relent but perhaps even intensifies in “richer societies. Inasmuch as we
are living through a pandemic of mental health and social health
problems that is occurring at the very time.
63 Richard Wilkinson.
and devastating effects of social change. Switzerland: WHO. we are informed. It can also be seen in
the statistical correlation of greater infant and maternal morality
and child and adult morbidity with the widening gap between the
richest 20 percent and poorest 20 percent of the population glo-
bally. economic. Hence
social suffering is a marker of disadvantage.
sexually transmitted diseases.
Race in America also correlates (even when poverty is statistically
controlled) with worse health and health care outcomes. certain mental and social health problems
have social roots. This is surely the case with the
spread of tobacco and alcohol use. That is to say. related violence. that
economies are growing faster than ever before and societies are
becoming materially richer than before.64 But while
poverty may be the most deadly social cause.[KLEINMAN] Experience and Its Moral Modes 391
But suffering is “social” in a second. relative powerlessness. Unhealthy Societies. sense
as well. it is not the only one.63 All societies have a health gradient in which by far the
greatest burden of disease and premature death is carried by their
poorest members. 1997)
. a major cause of social
62 Desjarlais et al.

and family and community
breakdown are all increasing (see fig. 66
Suff ering carries yet another. 40 percent of suicides globally). legal. “Transformation of Everyday Social
66
Experience in Chinese Communities. suicide (330. The result of this division of labor is that institutional
responses tend to fragment these problems into differentiated. Institutional practices make health and
social problems more intractable and deepen both the sense and
substance of misery.
65
Arthur Kleinman and Joan Kleinman. the way that health and problems such as drug abuse. and practi-
tioners appropriate the authentic voices of sufferers for their own
institutional ends. World Mental Health.
Sing Lee and Arthur Kleinman. Medicine and Psychiatry (in press) . 2). under economic re-
form and so-called market socialism. equally troubling social meaning:
namely.
Let me use one of my own professions -psychiatry -as a sad
but telling example.
and related conditions among the members of the poorest strata of
society are divided up and managed differently by the medical. as China. as measured
by Purchasing Power Parity. increasingly ones that last for
short periods and then are replaced by yet others that further re-
arrange and fracture these problems.
welfare. and other institutions of contemporary
society. STDs.
violence.
rates of alcoholism. STDs
(sexually transmitted diseases). But all too often there is an-
other result altogether. At the same time.” Harvard
Review of Psychiatry 5 (1997) : 43–46
. I want to make clear that I am not anti-
Desjarlais et al. AID S. has moved from a terribly
poor society to the world’s most rapidly growing and.000
deaths per year. The upshot sometimes can
be effective policies and programs. violence. First.” in Culture.. depression. “Epidemiology of Mental Illness in China. illicit drug abuse. here understood as disordered moral experience in a
disordering epoch. the world’s third largest economy. and the sedimentation of HIV/AIDS.
smaller pieces that then become the subject of highly particularized
technical policies and programs.65 For example. tuberculosis.392 The Tanner Lectures on Human Values
suffering. religious. narrow technical categories
strip away the moral significance of these problems.

“Mental Illness.” in E N C A R T A Encyclo-
pedia (Redmond. There are many important contributions that psychia-
trists and psychiatric institutions make. diagnosis. C HINA ’ S M ENTAL /S OCIAL H EALTH I NDICES
(1978-98)
Rates over 20 years
Alcohol Abuse
Illicit Substances
Depression
STDs
HIV/AIDS
Violence
Crime
Gambling
Displacement
psychiatry. including providing more
effective recognition. making it difficult or even
impossible to delimit the borders of these disorders. the official psychiatric diag-
67 See Arthur Kleinman. Hence the diagnosis
of depression.68 There
is no x-ray or blood test to diagnose a case.67 The knowledge base of psychiatry has grown
substantially. and treatment of mental illnesses
than in the past. 1988). when
the WHO claims that there are more than 300 million people
worldwide at this moment who suffer from depressive disorder. But psychiatry is in a unique
position vis-à-vis other medical specialties.
68 Arthur Kleinman and Alex Cohen. and with it has come more effective and efficient
mental health care for thousands. it is the only one for
which its core disorders do not have biological markers. we do not know how
valid this number is.
. Thus. When I was trained to be a
clinical psychiatrist. in the early 1970s. even schizophrenia.
Take the difference between normal bereavement and clinical
depression (a pathological state). and postraumatic stress disorder
is decided entirely on interview criteria.: Microsoft.[K LEINMAN ] Experience and Its Moral Modes 393
F IGURE 2.
although we know the actual number is high. Wash. Rethinking Psychiatry (New York: Free Press. 1998).

gender. and Ian Hacking. the number of bereaved is quite high. Does political
economy play a role in the institutional conversion of the bereaved
into patients? Almost certainly it does.
. In fact.
Now.69 The infiltration has been attributed to the
modern nation state and its institutional forms of social control. to their family members.
or a child. Because around 2 million people die each year
in our own country. a parent. What effect does an antidepressant
have on the experience of bereavement? What does it mean to the
sufferers. That
means that so is the number of potential patients. no. the cross-cultural data on bereave-
ment are so thin that it is really not known in a scholarly sense
what the course of bereavement is. for example. This is a process of remaking social
69 Margaret Lock. Inasmuch as the symptoms of bereave-
ment and depression are the same. and how it may vary by age.” Daedalus 125. T h e Taming of Chance (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press. a grieving family member is diagnosable as a case of
depressive disorder. there is as I mentioned “normal” bereavement
and pathological bereavement. see also George Can-
quilham. trans. Carolyn Faucett and Robert Cohen
(New York: Zone. Slightly
more than eight weeks following the death of a spouse. 1990). and to society to convert a
moral problem (grief) into a medical one (depression) ? Does
changing how we categorize normal bereavement influence the
subjective and interpersonal experience of grieving ? Anthropolo-
gists and historians of science have described how the idea of “nor-
mality” has been expanded from medicine to infiltrate almost
every area of society. Today DSM-IV. only the time criterion can
determine when the diagnosis is appropriate. the
official diagnostic system of the American Psychiatric Association. But this is not the only
problematic side to this story. or culture. 1 (1996): 207-44. After thirteen months (to avoid misdiagnosis
because of anniversary reactions). 160.
lists two months as the normal course of bereavement.394 The Tanner Lectures on Human Values
nostic criteria in our country taught that normal bereavement
lasted for one year. 1989). a bereaved person could be
diagnosed as depressed. p. “Displacing Suffering: The Reconstruction of Death in North
America and Japan. T h e Normal and the Pathological.

It would be grotesque to label all these patients as mentally
ill with depressive disorder: an extreme example of the institu-
tional transformation of suffering into disease.[KLEINMAN] Experience and Its Moral Modes 395
experience that is called “medicalization. as
when victims of political violence are labeled as cases of post-
traumatic stress disorder. and management of trauma. and the political. and energy disturbances
as well as their pain. Das.” we end up in
the same situation. forced
uprooting. While this may lead to financial benefits
and services.” What are the negative
effects of medicalization? Victims may be turned into patients. but it remakes
people into the objects of institutional Structural vio-
lence and welfare policy.
When we call a dying patient who is receiving end-of-life-care
for metastic breast or prostate cancer “depressed. But these are the same symptoms as those
of depressive disease. Most patients with end-stage cancers and also
terminal heart disease. and Lock. sleep. and religious responses to social suf-
fering tell much the same story. what is the moral. are tell-
ing instances. There is no scientific means to separate the
two.
70 Kleinman.
because their often serious appetite. And yet this is in-
creasingly happening. and the cycle of political violence. legal.
Here then is another illustration of social suffering. “Introduction. one in which
professionals and institutions transform the recalcitrance of a
moral problem into the corrigibility of a medical one. renal failure. Programs
that manage welfare. Sometimes this transformation is helpful. liver failure.”
. at other
times it is not. search for refuge. and health significance
of this transformation in social experience? I don’t think we know. Not only does social power break
persons and bodies in the causation of disease. the medical. The momentum seems to be inexorable. political. agitation. and sadness are produced by their
end-of-life medical conditions and also by the treatments they re-
ceive and by the tribulations of coming to terms with death and
crafting a way to die. and stroke can
make the technical interview-based criteria for clinical depression. But either way it reveals the inseparability of the
moral.

A small but telling example
from California is Anne Fadiman’s arresting account of how a
Hmong family with an epileptic child in Merced. whose loving
attention to a seriously ill daughter is quite extraordinary. 3 (February 19. racial.
no. T h e Spirit Catches Y o u and Y o u Fall Down (New Y o r k :
Farrar. and in the preoccupa-
tion of American Jews with the Holocaust as a uniquely defining
religious as well as cultural event.
7 2 Ian Buruma. Buruma concludes ruefully that ethnic. But it is equally crucial to focus on
moral processes so that we can come to see how the subjects of
institutional practices (as well as the practitioners) are caught up
in the very transpersonal processes of social experience that create.
sustain.
These cultural standards of practice will not allow them to share
control of the treatment. and in the constant rehearsals
of victimization in Serbian national identity that so frequently
justify horrific brutality to outsiders. 1997).71
The prolific book reviewer and social critic Ian Buruma defines
another sense in which social suffering holds salience for our
times. but precisely because their high standards
of professionalism lead to dedication but also to inflexibility. and in the insistent claims
by some in the Chinese American community that the Japanese
Army’s “rape” of Nanking in the 1930s is another “holocaust” to
be treated on the same level as the Nazi extermination of Euro-
pean Jewry.” N e w York Review of Books 45. 1998) : 4-8.396 The Tanner Lectures on Human Values
Ethical discourse can play a potentially useful role of reflexive
awareness of how an institution and its members come to under-
stand the way societal values and professional commitments in-
fluence their functioning. and appropriate suffering. and
7 1 Anne Fadiman. Straus and Giroux. not to grant respect to another cultural
reality. is made
over into child abusers whose child is forcibly removed by this
state’s governmental agencies not because her physicians are in-
competent or unfeeling.72 Analyzing the social uses of suffering in the cases of the
commercialization of Anne Frank’s diary. “The Afterlife of Anne Frank.
.

1998. points to the intersection of the great
cultural and political economic forces of our epoch with human
conditions. and failure to come to terms with changed times with
new problems and opportunities. But what sort of transformation in subjectivity
animates and constrains moral experience in our own era in this
society ?
7 3 W. DiPiero writes in the N e w York Times Book Review (March 8. a sense of moral
superiority. seems to suggest how powerful suffering can be as a
source of social movements and change.
Social suffering. and I feel as though I’m expected to envy or even covet such privilege. distorting sentimentality. I turn now to
that difficult and potentially ominous question. S. the identification by African Americans of
slavery and its long-term effects with “time on the cross. . Perhaps no other aspect of that trans-
formation is deeper and more dangerous than the changes in sub-
jectivity that affect suffering and our responses to it. It is also a reminder of the locality for the
coming together of religious. .
p. and individual identity in particular
worlds of pain that to outsiders may carry a very different signification.
.
A D EEP AND MOST DANGEROUS TRANSFORMATION
I earlier adverted to the changes in subjectivity that in com-
bination with changing cultural representations and collective
processes characterize the modes of moral experience of a particu-
lar time and place. ethnic.” However. . the wounded one whose identity has become de-
pendent on the wound.”
Seamus Heaney in his play The Cure at Troy. but he identifies a disturbing tendency. . .[KLEINMAN] Experience and Its Moral Modes 397
national overidentification with suff ering (including competition
over whose people’s suffering is greater) is a powerful collective
appropriation that can have dangerous consequences in creating
cycles of vengeance. based on Sophocles’ Philoctetes. such that normality and disorder are being recast into
new forms of social experience -forms that have as much to tell
us about the moral transformation in local worlds and globally
in our time as they do about our engagement with and responses
to those transformations.’’ suffering as an explicitly
Christian religious experience. 4) “a sour whiff of suffering as privilege rises from their [memoirs of suffering]
pages.73 Buruma’s criticisms can be
all too readily waved away as a kind of backlash from the un-
affected. then. writes
of “the swank of victimhood . political.

: Harvard Uni-
versity Press. . the
autonomy of the individual is fundamental to the Western moral
outlook.
7 5 Charles Taylor. The Sources of the Self (Cambridge. .”
Smith went on to argue that human nature assured that people
were the bearers of a much stronger feeling of tenderness toward
children than filial piety toward parents -a point whose reversal
in the Confucian tradition doesn’t lend confidence to our reception
of his claim to natural and universal standards. P. In our own era. as our mode of access to
the world in which ontological claims are discernible and can be
rationally argued about and sifted.398 The Tanner Lectures on Humun Values
Adam Smith in his Theory of M o r a l Sentiments reckoned that
pity and compassion were part of human nature. 1989). As a result. questions of
personal identity (read subjectivity) and questions of moral action
interfuse. for example). “How selfish soever man
may be supposed. makes
human beings fit objects of respect” (pp. 9.” 75 Taylor goes on to observe
that the modern situation in the West is such that while many con-
temporaries concur that “some ground in human nature . .
which interest him in the fortune of others. And yet. our ineradicable
sense that human life is to be respected. .” writes Taylor with characteristic concision. And he
points to the social space of ordinary life and moral questions that
hold considerable resonance with the definition I offered at the
outset of experience (p. 8. Mass. Theory o f Moral Sentiments (Indianapolis: Liberty Classics.
the distinguished Canadian moral theorist Charles Taylor writes
that “we should treat our deepest moral instincts. for Taylor the
7 4 Adam Smith.
1983 [1759]. As
Smith put it with a characteristic balance of jaundiced eye and one
big economic reason for expectant faith. that respect has
come to be formulated in terms of human rights. In this way. “We are.
“selves only in that certain issues matter for us” (p.74 They were the
primary source of our fellow feeling for the misery of others. and great importance is given to avoiding and relieving
suffering and affirming ordinary life. 35. p. 10-11). 34). there are evidently some principles in his nature. .
.

trauma. and sensibility. an inner
“craving which is ineradicable from human life. as Taylor suggests.[KLEINMAN] Experience and Its Moral Modes 399
idea of human nature. Now we need to see them in order to feel that stories
have been authenticated.
But we have already seen that the case for a single. and David Michael Levin. Modernity and
the Hegemony of Vision (Berkeley: University of California Press.
Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century Thought (Berkeley:
University of California Press. Indeed. We have to be
rightly placed in relation to the good” (p. At worst it is a means of
begging a greatly troubling question: namely. 1 (1996): 1-24. remains crucial. W e have. thanks to
an unprecedented infiltration of globalization into every nook and
cranny of local worlds. W e are no
longer merely titillated by appalling images of brutality. then what guarantees. 1993). and such a transformation in personhood. “The Appeal of Experience. But these images. see also Martin Jay. to be effective.
and carnage. he avers. I believe we are now undergoing. in different times
and places. moral responses and responsivity to those in misery and
to social suff ering more generally ?
Here I wish to argue that anthropologically speaking there is
no guarantee. on the subject of the uses of images. the Dis-
may of Images: Cultural Appropriations of Suffering in Our Times.” Daedalus 125.
affect. universal
human nature is unconvincing at best. despite the social space of moral action and
the fact that we come to our identity through historically situated
narrative forms. 44. must mean a transforma-
tion as well in moral processes -perhaps not on the order of
some of the earlier horrors I recounted. yet ominous nonetheless. a deep and a most dangerous transforma-
tion in subjectivity. 1993) .
no. must be
76 Arthur Kleinman and Joan Kleinman.
What evidence is there to support so dismaying an assertion?
Elsewhere Joan Kleinman and I have written of the com-
mercial appropriation of images and voices of suffering as info-
tainment on the nightly news to gain audience share. if there is no fixed
and final human nature. emphasis mine).76 The arrest-
ing artistry of photojournalism and the ubiquitous real-time video
recorder are making over witnessing into voyeurism.
.

also bespeak a transformation in moral-emotional processes
themselves? Are empathy and compassion being thinned out by
the sheer enormity of exposure to wounds and horrors? Does the
absence of a close connection that demands action mean that we
are seeing a dissociation of sensibility and responsivity. The heavy midsummer’s air fills with sobs. usually a great distance. And so powerful are T V images that they
may seem more real than lived experience.
with crying. there seems to
come to pass a stunning conversion of empathy into desire. 1979). to be engaged? Or
put in terms of the argument of this lecture. with the long loud wails of a single female voice. L a souffrance.77 There is
nothing we need do (or in fact can do) in these circumstances.400 The Tanner Lectures on Human Values
of suffering at a distance. It faces onto an interior courtyard. So
that both the suffering and our responses to it become gratuitous. the psychological. Consider also the idea of a proper distance for
emotional response in Thomas Scheff.
Midnight in an old apartment block. I am drawn by sounds
to an open window. as in the outpouring of grief for Princess
Diana. of feeling
and obligation to be there. so that images provide
the occasion for exhibition of moral-emotional responses of a kind
previously kept private. as when images involve sexual imagery. And what about me? About me? I’m left
7 7 Boltanski.
. Ritual and Drama
(Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. to do something. Catharsis in Healing. are those very expecta-
tions to be understood as specific to a particular societal configura-
tion of the political. the economic.
“Dead! D o you want me dead? Is that i t ? Do you want to take
everything away from me? Everything in me? Do you? Do you?
You go on upward. and the
moral ?
Let me illustrate what I have in mind with a brief tale of some-
thing that happened to me last summer. a trans-
formation that the extraordinary photographic artistry of our age
clearly aims to achieve. Dried
leaves stick to its panes. under the immense pressure of commercial
power.
Sometimes. Does such a transformation in cultural representation and
collective response.

its insistent force. no obligation to be engaged. ominous. hours afterward. an indistinct remainder of the
danger of words.[KLEINMAN] Experience and Its Moral Modes 401
behind. distressing moans follow. faint but still present. There is freedom to listen in or not. Here
before me was a riveting instance of break-up and loss. the anonymity of the occasion leaves an aftertaste of
lingering disquiet.
I am a sojourner in a foreign city. like an old coat . I know no one here. . So much pas-
sionate energy overflows that for a few menacing moments I even
worry about the risk for suicide.
One that has for me neither a beginning nor an ending. listening in the darkness. Ayeh!”
Deep. it keeps me still. There are no faces. There
is no sensible reason for me to be so engaged with the aftereffects
of the commotion. Nothing
is required of me. The distraught voice stops me
completely with its pain. but there is neither direct threat
nor action.makes me think it will end as a court case. an experi-
ence about which I knew nothing and could do nothing.
The end of a marriage? The close of a long affair? The tone
color of the domestic threnody -dark. an asthmatic. who are on vacation far away. damn you. The wrench of loss sounds absolute. . Now this can happen to
. in-
side. . . which caused the
sounds to echo down the corridors of memory. but still I
was held by its sheer intensity. . but no re-
sponsibility. Yet. gasp
for air. staying in the apartment of
others. drawing taut the
filaments of sympathy. Left behind? Left alone!
Left to die! Left to die! Ayeh . I
can feel the ache of breathing broken by sobs reverberate in my
own chest! The clutching sensation makes me. no history known
to me can bring the event into a context of significance. Nonetheless the thought stays in mind. Ayeh . no stories I can affix to the
disembodied voices to give them personal shape. I am but the spectator of a transitory event. Framed by so muted and minimal a response from a thin
male voice. as it would for
a psychiatrist.
But still. I can still feel the anguished pain. filled with bitter
hurt. . long after
an upstairs window snaps shut and all sounds cease.

save self-interest. some have fun. The juxtaposi-
tion of real agony and commercialized joy. is
shocking. In The Provocation of Levinas. The film clip
ends on this point of uncertainty. The commentator mentions the uncertainty
of whether this victim was also.
because we have changed in some basic way? 78 If this is our new
condition. Healthy. no longer holds. Beraconi and D.402 The Tanner Lectures on Human Values
anyone at anytime. almost inaudibly. and disregard? Does it
alter the moral response to suffering?
Musing in the early morning quiet. entertainment. Am I worrying
over a sign of some fundamental rupture in what I had been edu-
cated to believe to be the existential order of things? Has there
been. and the like. in solidarity with the sufferer. long journey. “Useless Suffering. it’s all a matter of switching chan-
nels? Is it a commentary on the lack of moral engagement? Noth-
ing need matter to the viewer. speaking very
quietly. travel. One of the wounded. a seismic shift in the self and in moral sensi-
bility? So that the rock-certain claim about the Judeo-Christian
tradition of the late European ethicist Emmanuel Levinas. Film flickers across my
memory of wounded refugees dying in the bush in a Zaire that no
longer exists. a teenage boy. that
moral practice begins with the empathic suffering of the witness
in engagement. Owing to the global changes in com-
munication. 1988). suppose we are
recreating the world so that we are awash in exposures to suffering
that are primarily gratuitous. What then does it do to us ? Does it
eventually lead us to tune out. black and white. a fragment of pain followed
immediately by an advertisement for beer. a victimizer. Wood (London and New York: Routledge. what would be the implications of such a change in
7 8 Emmanuel Levinas. imperceptibly. I think back to a TV news
program I saw some months before. recounts the horrors his family has experienced on the
long. close off.
ed. earlier. playfully
happy. some die. eroticized white bodies frolic at the beach. his ebony face an immobile mask of
resignation. Is there a message here? Is it that experiences come and
go. R.
. But suppose we are repeatedly experiencing
such anonymous suffering.

when writ large as a transition in so-
ciety’s collective sensibility and behavior ? Can a disordering time
such as ours break Western societal traditions of human engage-
ment and substitute in their place something more sinister. in communication. in
global culture-transformations that in turn are reshaping societal
structures such as the city and the workplace and the home as well
as creating new lifestyles and perhaps even new forms of behavior. in ethnicity and gen-
der). to justify such a query. as has happened in the past and is still
happening around the world ?
Here you have the question at the heart of this exploration. in response to
which not only has empathy been tested but.g. more
destabilizing for our future. in transportation. And one can point almost endlessly as well to evidence
that all of human history has its share of misery. greater familiarity with other cultures. Globalization also carries with it greater attention to inter-
national relations. a new type of personhood. in technology. it
has failed.. Forgetting and denial have made the moral effects of
such failure tolerable.
Several objections to this train of thought can be lodged. of
course. as
I believe there is. in who we are. at crucial points. and
arguably more respect for differences (e.[K LEINMAN ] Experience and Its M o r a l Modes 40 3
subjectivity.
The unsettling compression in time and space and the fragmenta-
tion of cultural practices and confusion of virtual and lived reali-
ties that characterize this age -are they also altering the collective
and personal poles of everyday experience? If there is reason. like other momen-
tous times of epochal change before it. what significance does a
potential change in the ordinary existential roots of experience -
the way we feel and act -hold for our understanding of moral
questions and practices? Either human nature is malleable to a
degree we have never imagined and we are participating right
now in a sea change in its elements. or our era.
W e live in a time of immense transformations in financial systems. Suppose this
were the case.
in trade. allowing ordinary men and women to live
. is ushering in another form
of subjectivity altogether.

Like some universal
solvent the disordering effects of advanced capitalism appear to be
dissolving much that really matters to ordinary men and women
globally. That it is flanked by other changes with potentially
different effects makes the story told in these pages both more com-
plexly human and more interesting. Is this merely an essentializing millenarian dismay? Is it
the kind of apperception of danger to what is at stake that I char-
acterized earlier as itself a spur of desperate and inhuman acts?
Or is it our enormous preoccupation with. say. Harvard Medical School.
.” Department of Social Medicine. social institutions. and yet ourselves remain the same.
Global social change is indeed complex. for all that. Because that is the way
79 I am indebted to Gerald Bruns for this idea.79 There is a sense today that this fear of the loss of the hu-
man is not entirely romantic or unwarranted.404 The Tanner Lectures on Haman Values
through bad times while not feeling such despair that they have
given up or experiencing such hypocrisy that they have annulled
projects of tradition and modernity of those who follow them. That at base we can change political econ-
omy. Nonetheless. The alteration in
collective and individual experience that I have identified may be
offset by other changes.
April 23. 1998. but I accept responsibility for
the way I use it here. technology. the transforma-
tion of moral and emotional processes seems real enough and con-
sequential. and cultural
forms. See his Roger Allan Moore Lecture.
It is reflections like this one that in past eras and in other so-
cieties have led concerned people to wonder aloud whether such
changes can be fundamental enough to cause the loss of the hu-
man. multisided. political practices. which differs in a fundamental way from Bruns’s sense that
there may be a useful effect of widening and remaking what is meant by the
“human” within a moral community. “On
Ceasing to Be Human. and likely
to have several (perhaps contradictory) effects. the threat of alien
invasions that is itself a sign of our recognition of the alien linea-
ments of our time and even a self-reflexive sensibility that we are
ourselves becoming alien ?
So much depends on maintaining the fiction that nothing has
changed all that much.

gender. and programs concerned with social suffering.
Rather. not to conjure up prudishly the tawdriness. What if it isn't just material things like information
and entertainment technologies that are different. policies.80 No. Actually. but relationships
and sensibilities and all the other dense package of moral-emotional
things that constitute and express subjectivity.
1998). there are many positive sides to our
epoch-in technology. in legal procedure. But things clearly are not
the same. I want to spend the second of my lectures to address
the chief implication of this analysis for scholarship. Alan Wolfe. the squa-
lor. in social policy. rather I seek to press home the point about a
transformation in experience and its moral modes in order to
figure out what that transformation specifically may mean for
practices.[KLEINMAN] Experience and Its Moral Modes 405
things seem to have been and will be. and even in other
domains where self-reflective awareness is ramifying -that do at
times make me feel cautiously optimistic about other aspects of
our future. for example.
experience?
I realize I may not have convinced you that there is a widening
gap between the witnessing of disaster and the feeling of an obli-
gation to respond. One Nation after All (New York: Viking. nothing but the years to come will
show if this be prescience or alarmism. and other difference.
80 See. In any event. for practice.
. My purpose here is not to level a moral indictment
of our times. or the horrors that would make for a fin-de-siècle call for
moral rejuvenation.
and for policy. I simply don't have the space needed to review
the various sorts of data that would be necessary to better sub-
stantiate my case. intersubjectivity. in re-
spect for cultural.

religious. and the patient-practitioner-family rela-
tionship that is so central to health care. A N D THE
MEDICAL: ETHNOGRAPHIC A N D CLINICAL
APPROACHES TO HUMAN ENGAGEMENT
Images in the popular media are not the only materials I can
present to make a case for a moral mutation in experience. During that time the clinician needs to check the re-
sults of blood tests and other lab values. cancer. and response to new treatments. discussing disability assessment.
making referrals. and plan the further course of care
(including rearranging a regimen of diet. and other sources of dif-
. THE MORAL. and lifestyle.
solicit the patient’s illness narrative. take a history of symptoms. current function-
ing. (Of course. Take
my own field of medicine. and communicate sensi-
tively about the prognosis and next phase of care. and the like) . engage the emotional. perform a physical examina-
tion and write prescriptions. The managed care revolu-
tion that we are living through today -a transformative part of
transnational political economic developments -in its unprece-
dented search for efficiency (and profits) has altered this core
clinical relationship almost beyond recognition and raised a serious
question as to whether the core skills of doctoring can be pre-
served.) A typical scenario in managed primary
care is that a physician has between twelve and fifteen minutes
to see a seriously ill patient on a follow-up visit for a complicated
chronic condition such as diabetes. exercise. managed care has also done certain useful
things like reduce unnecessary medical costs and improve regula-
tion of practice standards. gender. There is literally no time to do what that
clinician has been trained to do to provide quality care: namely. read the x-rays (or the
radiologist’s report). THE POLITICAL.
and work issues that together constitute the social course of the
disorder and the response to treatment.406 The Tanner Lectures on Human Values
LECTURE II.
There is such a compression of time that there is hardly time to
accomplish these tasks. Engagement
with issues of cultural. or clinical
depression. heart disease. family.

What good does it do?
-65-year -old man with worsening diabetes and associated
kidney.
The upshot.
family members. The practitioner. cannot adequately deal with the patient’s suffering. and practitioners. But it only makes things worse for me. She doesn’t hear well. taken into account. It’s very frustrating.
And then I am rushed out. What can you d o ? They make me so angry
sometimes that I want to stop coming . and metabolic problems
You would think I was irrelevant to my disease from the way
I get treated. I don’t get a chance to tell all that
has happened. I am
very angry and very disappointed. visual. When I make
a suggestion. I want to shake
them by the scruff of the neck and tell ’em: Here. No one asks anymore how I am feeling. Sometimes I pur-
posefully miss an appointment or don’t comply with the treat-
ment. She needs someone to
speak with her who can slowly explain what her dizziness is
about and why it is so difficult to control. That is what these voices mean
to convey:
They rush me in for a visit. is frustration.
-55-year -old woman who is a real estate agent
.
-39-year -old college teacher with a chronic intestinal condition
I’m just so angry at them.as silly and futile as it is.
-64-year -old mechanic with chronic liver disease
My mother is 93.
How can they use the word “quality” to describe the care she
gets ? But there is no alternative. anything
really to show them that I am part of this.[KLEINMAN] Experience and Its Moral Modes 407
ference in clinical case management that requires additional time
and effort is almost certain to be short-changed. There is hardly time to talk about
what is happening. and a deep sense of disaffection on behalf of patients.
that is to say. Nobody asks me about my ideas. Sometimes I don’t show
up. Or even to ask about what is coming next. and it makes me want to do something.
anger. it’s taken as if it came from left field. don’t you
disregard me. as we are now becoming aware. But the doctors and
nurses don’t even seem to have the time to speak to me so that
I can explain to her what’s happening. I’m sore because I want to
have my opinion respected. It makes
me angry. They don’t listen.

attention to what bothers them. And if you don’t. But that’s preposterous.” because we spent most
of our time on the management issues. This isn’t the language of clinical
practice I was trained in. I’m beginning to think it is not for me. The managed
care institution with all its paraphernalia has become more im-
portant than the patient. responding
to their fears and wants. I
simply don’t trust people in the hospital. You need to do these things
because they really are essential.
-60-year -old primary care physician in a managed care practice
in a Health Maintenance Organization (HMO)
W e all know medicine is going through a revolution. It’s all a new language: cost. good communicative skills. I think that is a dan-
gerous slide in the moral content of doctoring. and so little emphasis on
spending time with patients. I need to
get out of it. I read the papers. My institution
doesn’t seem to value any longer those things I was trained to
believe are central to good care: a close trusting relationship
with your patients. If you don’t push ’em.408 The Tanner Lectures on Human Values
I was so scared that they would not give my dad all he requires. explaining what needs to be done. then what kind of doctor are you ? What kind of
care are you giving? It’s really a moral issue. Another 80-year-old. effi-
ciency. I watch what they are
doing and I speak up. Time to pull
the plug. asking about
their problems. There is so little time. is happening
to medicine. talking to them. I feel frustrated and very. don’t do
them I mean. and to ration care. So we
can’t even tell ourselves lies we can believe in. Well. The relationship should be called
“patient-doctor-managed care provider. But you
like to believe -have to believe -that the change off sets only
the nonclinical aspect of care.
-40-year -old African -American lawyer whose 81-year -old father
was in a teaching hospital with stroke and heart disease
Something very deep and very bad has happened. very
alienated. That is
not only the “soft” side of care. I pushed ’em for Dad. management talk. I know what doctors are doing to
keep costs down. you
don’t get what you should.
-48-year -old primary care physician in a large HMO
.
They might write him off. enough time to
talk things over with patients who are going through bad times
with their diseases.

many more complaints in support of the overall theme. Some of the same
complaints have been leveled against medical practice for a long
time. But I could provide many. as part of a century-long
institutional transition. yet
they have been around for decades. They don’t. The en-
gagement with patient and families’ experiences of suffering ap-
pears to many to be thinning out and even disappearing under the
managerial pressure of health care financing and delivery “re-
form. technician. Wouldn’t
you call that a pedagogic crisis? But for a medical educator it
is also a moral crisis. The human engagement with
pain and suffering is being reformulated. they won’t! They can’t take the time. sev-
eral things are happening in concert. and
they will not get the support they need from practice managers
to do the things they know how to do and know they should
do. and acting as
if they have the time to do these things once they get into prac-
tice. So there we are. I have selected these excerpts from interviews to
make my point. (Is self-identity of the patient also
transmuting from sufferer to consumer and co-payer and commodi-
fied object of technological and managerial manipulation ?) That
change is a transformation in the moral processes of illness experi-
ence and doctoring. The problems may be intensifying. That is medical education today.” The change is a change in the clinical relationship (and in
self-identity of the health professional from healer to business-
person. They are a biased sample. What to d o ?
57-year -old medical educator at a leading
American medical school
Of course.[K LEINMAN ] Experience and Its Moral Modes 409
Sometimes I feel like a hypocrite. into purely technical issues that are man-
.
In the social transformation of American medicine today. well before the current era of managed care and the cor-
poratization of medicine. I am standing up before a
room of medical students and teaching them things about com-
munication and psychosocial skills in doctoring. but over time it also shapes
expectations and practices so that the intersubjective experience
of clinical care is changing. or bureaucrat).

professional ethical dis-
course. perhaps the last major holdout from the domi-
nance of technical rationality and institutional control (see John Patrick Diggins. 12-16.
M a x Weber -Politics and the Spirit of Tragedy [New York: Basic Books. there is in practice
a revaluation of values. beeper in hand. 99-101. Thus. And this
moral transformation of meanings and experience works hand in
glove with the political-economic transformation of medicine into
more highly institutionalized systems in which the proletarianiza-
tion of professionals and the commoditization of health and health
care are tied up with greater bureaucratic efficiency and control. In that squeeze moral processes in the patient-
family-doctor relationship either are left unaddressed or are con-
verted into their technological equivalent. But the revaluation is not out of keeping
with cultural and political processes in the Western tradition -
not at all. the political. 1996].81
The deep connections between the moral.410 The Tanner Lectures on Human Values
aged by technology and technical rationality. which itself has become a subspecialty of biomedicine (to
wit: bioethics). At the same time. points the way toward the transformation of
medical care into industrial models such as the servicing of auto-
mobiles or the training of airline pilots in safe practices. mind-body dualism. Hence the curiously disquieting image of the clini-
cal bioethicist. Thus.
pp. responding to emergency pages to
render definitive ethical judgments immediately so that business
can get under way expeditiously. par-
81 In this sense of the triumph of managerial and institutional rationality as a
source of “efficiency. the ethos of
end-of-life care is being converted from a religious and moral one
into a psychiatric question of using psychotropic medication to
treat clinical depression. and the
medical are particularly visible in the management of pain.
. with its supporting ideas of
the body as a machine and rejection of matter (physical stuff) en-
compassing spirit. 106-9). and subject to some of the same pressures of time
and efficiency. In either case. the political-economic
transformations of health care financing and delivery are com-
pressing time to a minimum that is consistent with the greatest
efficiency and profits.” we are watching the working out of the Weberian forecast for
society as a whole within medicine.

there is another way to proceed here. The Body i n Pain (New York: Oxford University Press. as if they were deliberately deceiving their
caregivers.
84 See the way this point is made by Stanley Cavell.
83 See. but rather a reform in local moral processes and in the
application of ethical formulations for those circumstances.84 Failure
to acknowledge the other’s condition is a moral (and cultural)
failure.’ while for the other person it is so elusive that ‘hearing
about pain’ may exist as the primary model of what it is ‘to have
doubt. and David Mechanic. no matter what is the cognitive issue at hand. 1 (1996): 93-98.’ Thus pain comes unsharably into our midst as at once that
which cannot be denied and that which cannot be confirmed. 4. No wonder so many
chronic pain patients complain that medical care has failed them
because they feel they are treated without respect for their suffer-
ing and without trust. 1987). Ask physician pain experts and you all-too-often see
the mirror-image: complete distrust of patients’ complaints. Arthur Kleinman. for example.”
Daedalus 125.[KLEINMAN] Experience and Its Moral Modes 411
ticularly chronic pain. so incontestably
and unnegotiably present is it that ‘having pain’ may come to be
thought of as the most vibrant example of what it is to ‘have cer-
tainty.
. Marian Osterweis.: American Academy Press. It is established as the
kind of issue that requires legal procedure.
1985). Acknowledgment of the words
and feelings of the other in pain is what is called for.. The value com-
mitment of engagement with the person in pain that holds for
practitioner or family caregiver in various formulations of ethics
and the moral requirement of such engagement in many local
worlds of medicine are not the same as the rational technical
detection of truth or deception. for the person in pain.
eds.C. p. Pain and Disability (Washington.83
Surely. Ethical dis-
course about the principle of beneficence is not what I have in
mind.
82 Elaine Scarry. no. D. Elaine Scarry has tellingly put it for our
Western tradition: “So. “Comments on Veena Das.” 82
The problem of pain is posed as a cognitive one: a truth that
cannot be denied and cannot be confirmed.

. 397.) cites Stanley Cavell’s The Claim of Reason (New York and
London: Oxford University Press. Wei-M ing Tu has shown that this implies. 63-78. engagement with others’ pain and suffering. “Useless Suffering. Mencius remarked. Y. Kosterlitz and L.412 The Tanner Lectures on Human Values
Take the Confucian approach to suffering.86 “For Levinas. T o extend this to what he can bear is benevolence (or humane-
ness) ’’ (VIIB: 3 1) . not a cognitive relation.
The Jewish and Christian religious traditions in the West also con-
tain a central commitment to the idea that the suffering other is to
be engaged with compassion. so that.
86 Levinas. and legal procedure -drives such religious and ethi-
85 See Wei-Ming Tu. as a further development of this
position on the primacy of moral engagement with others: “Being human is the
power to grant being human.’ . pp. the suffer-
ing of the witness on behalf of the sufferer provides the moral use-
fulness of the latter’s plight. an influential anthropologist of religion.”
. Something about flesh and blood elicits this grant
from us.88
Tala1 Asad.” as Gerald Bruns so
tellingly puts it. argues
that the hegemonic global ideology of the present time -namely.”
87 Bruns. . as a telling alterna-
tive. the technical rationality of policy deci-
sion making. every
human being (and every human relation) is unique and refractory
to categorization. This incommeasurable relation is that of the ethical
claim. Terenius.”87 Levinas insists that there is no human nature. . p. ed H. on
the moral level. “A Religiophilosophical Perspective on Pain. and something about flesh and blood can also repel it.” in Pain
and Society. 1980
(Weinheim: Verlag Chemie Gmbh. . “On Ceasing to Be Human.85 It
is the extension of the moral-emotional capacity of the person to
engage the other that is the issue. “the face-to-face [relation] is an ethical [in our
terms ‘moral’]. it is ethical precisely be-
cause non-cognitive. . 1979). as Levinas puts it. 1982). That exercise of human capa-
bility begins with acknowledgment and includes embodying the
experience of the other’s pain as compassion and responsiveness. Dahlen Conference. ‘The face [of the other] speaks to me
and thereby invites me to a relation incommensurate with a power
exercised. W.”
88 Bruns (ibid.
an amalgam of technology. “For every man there are things he cannot
bear.

This would seem to be an accurate por-
trayal of what is happening in the health care domain.89 This
analysis is in keeping with Max Weber’s argument that institu-
tional forms in society would come to occupy a central place
because they would be the strongest source of rational technical con-
trol and its efficiencies. and the ad hoc would be deprived of a central
place in public discourse and in social process. chapter 1 5 in T h e Illness Narratives. sentiment.
. 247.”
in his Skeptical Sociology (New York: Columbia University Press. tradi-
tion. intersub-
jective moral processes in human relationships would lose their
centrality. But if this is the reason why the current coming to-
gether of the medical. everyday space of moral processes
in a local world.[KLEINMAN] Experience and Its Moral Modes 41 3
cal framings of suffering as well as their consequences in moral
processes out of the mainstream and onto the sidelines. As part of the anthropological program. in favor of the
hegemonic rational technical discourse. and more generally in human interactions? In this lec-
ture. or rather would be reframed as cognitive questions for
bureaucratic adjudication. and per-
haps this reframing is happening even more generally in everyday
social life. then what alternatives are there
that would sponsor a different and more humane approach to clini-
cal practice. p. I seek to address the questions by employing an anthropologi-
cal understanding of ethnography (and of clinical work as a kind
of ethnographic application) as a model for moral engagement. and only after privi-
89 Asad. Genealogies of Religion. “Oversocialited Conceptions of Man in Modern Sociology. ethno-
graphic description and interpretation is called “experience near” .
it precedes from the general to the particular.91
C ONCLUSION: M ORAL E NGAGEMENT -ETHNOGRAPHY
AS A H UMAN PRACTICE
Ethnography is an engagement with others that brings the
ethnographer into the ordinary. 1976). the moral. The result would mean that religion.
90 Denis Wrong. 90 In both visions.
91 Arthur Kleinman. and the political is creating a
problem for moral experience.

Even her involvement with global processes differs from that of
those around her. is always an outsider. This form of
insider-outsider engagement with a world of social experience has
led to ethnographers being described. and perhaps is one reason why
many anthropologists end up studying marginal persons and groups. as double agents or.
at worse. And it is this positioning that makes ethnog-
raphy. one large
advantage. or on her
informants and friends. not the qualities of the ethnographer. the ethnographer feels the pull of ties that bind her else-
where.
(This even becomes true for the indigenous ethnographer.) In-
deed. to her own network and to the world of scholarly discourse. no matter how successful
she is in participant observation. and history shows that all sorts of people have taken up the
practice with varying results.
She is aware (often acutely so) of that difference. she is not so fully absorbed by what is most at stake for local
stake-holders that their world of experience becomes hers as well. then. But it confers. in a somewhat nicer expression. especially in earlier eras.
That creates a defining marginality. is the practice it
realizes.414 The Tanner Lectures on Human Values
leging the local does it extend back to a general framework that
enables comparisons. what is more. and she will almost certainly at some
point get caught up in the give and take of daily life. It is not easy on the ethnographer. creates such a destabi-
. despite certain limitations in reliability of its findings. for all
that.
What is special about ethnography. the ethnographer can claim no special human vir-
tues. that separation. in this instance. but. an
interesting approach for moral theory -one that also holds poten-
tial significance for practice and policy. What they do share usually is the
burden of the almost impossible requirement of participating in
local moral processes yet also being outside them. The ethnographer’s angle of exposure places her so
uncomfortably between distinctive moral worlds and local and
global ethical discourses and. With respect to the
subject at hand. She will
come to understand local categories and even perhaps to feel the
weight of local obligations. The ethnographer. pro-
fessional strangers.

as professionally discomfiting
and personally burdensome as it often becomes. certain forms of lit-
erary criticism come to mind (not to mention the experience of
immigrants) -all of which either share the comparative method
or create the opportunity for destabilizing comparative engage-
ment with experience of equal depth.
Besides the critical self-reflection on diff erent cultural processes
that it realizes in actual interpersonal engagements. self-
reflexively critical of her own positioning and the commitments
and problems it leads to as well as attentive to the new and unex-
pected possibilities that can (and so often do in real life) emerge. cross-cultural medicine.
as I have described them here.[K LEINMAN ] Experience and Its M o r a l Modes 415
lizing tension between them that she is forced to become. The disciplined professional skill with which the
ethnographer tries to get things right from the native point of
view means that ethnographic description can at best establish eth-
. enables a com-
parison of the moral processes she comes to understand (with-
stand?) in her fieldwork with the moral processes that she is
usually so taken up with in her own world that she (like most of
the rest of us) takes them for granted to such an extent that they
operate behind her back. could be said to be the actual stuff
(the subject matter) of ethnographic enquiry. even if many eth-
nographers have used other names or categories to deal with them.
comparative religion. and also that she examine how both are rooted in par-
ticular forms of moral experience. which.
The situation is clearest with respect to moral processes. even at
times it seems from published accounts against her will. There are probably other forms of en-
gagement that give somewhat similar access to the moral modes
of diff erent worlds of experience -psychotherapy. But for the purpose of this
analysis I will focus on ethnography.
The ethnographer’s very marginality. social history. ethnography
more or less demands that the ethnographer take both indigenous
ethical discourse and global ethical discourse into account simul-
taneously. That ethnographers often find
ways to avoid the responsibility must be one of the arresting ironies
of scholarship.

In a recent workshop on “Ethics. point out. the same
resonant interest in ethnography within bioethics and same caution were raised.)
. See. In recent years the call for ethnography in bioethics has become louder
and voiced by many. for example. 1998. This is the scholarly contribution that ethnographers
could make to moral theory. Were most
ethnographers better prepared in ethical discourse.92 I went on to describe
how clinicians can undertake a mini-ethnography of the illness
experience and interpretation of illness narratives as both collec-
tive and individual to the benefit of care.416 The Tanner Lectures on Human Values
noethical categories and describe how they are deployed in indige-
nous ethical discourse and relate to global framings. 275). Because ethnography. But because of what I have
already said about the dire effects of the managerial transforma-
tion of health care services on clinical practice I have no illusion
that this is feasible under the current regime of the corporatization
92 Ibid. 1 2 (1992) : 1421–
32. in The Illness Narratives. N. I sought to
emphasize the ethnographer’s willingness to listen to others. School.
Ten years ago. and her skill in getting at what
matters to people going about all the things that make up every-
day life. March 12. and multiple authors writing in Raymond DeVries and Janardan Sabede.
Medicine. no. Barry Hoffmaster. 1998). “Can Ethnography Save
the Life of Medical Ethics?” Social Science and Medicine 35. (But see note 95 for a brief reflection on ethnography’s contribu-
tions to scholarship. but also an intrinsic part of social and cultural
anthropology.” Harvard Medical.:
Prentice Hall.
Here I am less interested in the example of ethnography as a research method based
in social theory and anthropological training than I am in the sensibility that eth-
nography requires of (and creates for) the ethnographer in the actual practice of
doing fieldwork. But as Renee Fox and Raymond DeVries. this new fashion has raised so much enthusiasm that the point is
often missed that ethnographic study is a scholarly discipline requiring rigorous
training and disciplined application (p. I suggested that clini-
cal work can be modeled on ethnography. In particular. if moral theorists decide they wish to participate in
this approach they need training in anthropology. writing in the same
volume. I thought that this disciplined yet open-ended engage-
ment could be a model for caregiving. and Social Science. they would be
in an almost ideal place to project the local into the global (and
vice versa). eds. to
solicit and attend to their stories.
Bioethical Society: Constructing the Ethical Enterprise (Upper Saddle River. is not merely a social science methodology.J. at least as I
describe it here. and a
demanding one.

Charles Bosk. her hesitancy to
prescribe interventions. Nonetheless. Medicine and Social Science” workshop featured the ethno-
graphic contributions of Veena Das. Barbara Koenig. changing. Nothing about ethnography is anything like
a panacea or proven preventative.
Nicholas Christakis. diverse. among others. and divisive local worlds of
our era.
the ethnographer is “called” into the stories and lives of others by
93 The “Ethics. divided sensibility that ethnography brings of
being both within and without the flow of experience is not in-
appropriate modus vivendi. And there are now available
several impressive models of what this practice entails. the
ontological uncertainties. Yet. at least until their human consequences can
be better understood.
In the complex. and her willingness to compare
local processes and nonlocal discourse so that they can come into
relation with each other are not irrelevant to the thrust of argu-
ment in this lecture. which are so readily distorted by ana-
lytic preoccupation with business practices and technical efficiencies. Renee Fox. the uneasy.93 Ethnog-
raphy as ethical practice in health and medicine. the epistemological scruples. then.
. but to engage them and to
witness their problems so as to be of use (based as it would be in
her acutely dismaying understanding of the failure of earlier gen-
erations of fieldworkers to do so). ethnography still seems to me appropri-
ate for educating medical students about illness as experience and
for the practice of medical ethicists. in the absence of any ulti-
mate guarantee of compassion and willingness to acknowledge and
respond to the suffering of others. and Alexander Capron. is a growing
concern that deserves another lecture all to itself. The ethnographer’s self-reflective criti-
cism of her own positioning and its limitations.[KLEINMAN] Experience and Its Moral Modes 417
of medicine. Mary-Jo Delvecchio Good. Not the least of
its potential contributions is that it makes unavoidable the moral
requirements of doctoring. her newly emergent readiness to make a
commitment not just to study others. and the moral sensibilities (and predica-
ments) of the ethnographer offer themselves up as one means
(limited and unpredictable though it be) of sustaining empathy
and engagement that deserves serious consideration. That is to say.

at the close. It tacks back and forth
. technological. and that call to take account of what is at stake for people
becomes an instructive aspect of the ethnographer’s sensibility. and Desjarlais et al. Nonetheless. World
Mental Health. would there be the possibility of a countervailing social
process in our globalized times? Could it broaden the horizon of
moral imagination so as to encourage engagement with the mar-
ginal and solidarity with the afflicted? The expectation of what
could be achieved would. including both indirect participant observation and
direct interviews. “Introduction”.95 How this might be accomplished in a society
94 See Kleinman.. in a certain way. because the lan-
guage of policy is so powerfully controlled by economics and deci-
sion analysis and legal procedure that it is difficult to pry open
even a small space for ethnography.94 The obstacles
to the realization of that moment are formidable.
Were this sensibility to be encouraged among ordinary men
and women as a mode of moral experience (and ethical reflec-
tion).418 The Tanner Lectures on Human Values
the moral process of engaged listening. more nineteenth than twenty-first century. with a relatively small number of informants. in
keeping with the modesty of an anthropological intervention that
amounts to rather little when put up against the driving force of
political-economic. of course. the commitment to wit-
nessing. Das. Ethnography is. and Lock. The only thing perhaps to
recommend it is that it is the only thing I can think of that emerges
from (and seems valid within) my own circumstances. and social-institutional change in
our disordering epoch. What I am now suggesting is
that the ethnographic approach be developed more generally as a
means of teaching about moral processes and examining their prac-
tical implications.
9 5 That brings us. not days or weeks. to scholarship. It em-
phasizes face-to-face engagements. a
good deal of time: months and years.
a backward-looking methodology. It takes time. efforts are under-
way to try to produce a change. need to be quite limited.
Some of us have argued for such an ethnographic moment in
policy and programs directed at social suffering. or the equally dangerous political and reli-
gious and ethnic-nationalist fundamentalisms that have intensified
in order to resist such transformation.

It is not oriented toward reliability -the verification of observa-
tions -nearly as much as it is toward validity -the verification of the concepts
that stand behind and shape those observations. anthropology. molecular biological. I am willing to propose ethnographic sensibility as a way
of living with the challenges that the next millennium has already
between description and interpretation based on social theory.
ing out the social dynamics of ordinary experience and offering a comparative analy. Thus. It
is inefficient.
indigenous categories. Without relin-
quishing my own tendency to see the future in Weberian terms
as the propensity of unfolding into newer and deeper historical
tragedies. and the eco-
nomic. it has the potential (all too infrequently realized in
practice. to be sure) to relate the moral to the medical. humanities. not at all inappropriate
for an academic discipline. and psychological tests. historical
archives. Indeed. and the like. In an era that is witnessing the hege-
mony of analyses based in economic.[KLEINMAN] Experience and Its Moral Modes 419
such as ours goes far enough beyond the limits of this lecture to
suggest that it would be most prudent to break off here with merely
the barest outline of this modest proposal. linguistic data. content analysis of narratives. It is curious in that it is an approach
that combines humanistic and social science methodologies. the political. Thus. A methodology that can encompass narratives as well as numbers has a cer-
tain advantage in interdisciplinary enterprises. economic data. ethnography relies as much on
the ethnographer as a calibrated instrument of evaluation as on questionnaires. which it tends to recast in light of the findings. Yet I do think that it
may well be in the sphere of applied moral theory that ethnog-
raphy. struc-
tured and semistructured interview guides. Perhaps there is no better use of
ethnography than when the researcher is a disciplined observed and interpreter in
the engagement with moral issues. social science. it proceeds
from the general to the minutely particular. that crosses the three great intellectual
divides of the academy: natural science. for bringing together in the same context moral and
ethical materials. Because it can be combined with quantitative social science techniques and
with physiological measurement. For this reason ethnography is a highly appro-
priate methodology for scholarship in the relation of moral theory to everyday ex-
perience of moral processes. Such a seem-
ing irony would be quite in keeping with the deeply human roots
and consequences of ethnographic engagement. could well hold most promise. ethnography has a certain utility to get at the human aspects
of a wide range of subjects. This is also why it is appropriate as a method for evaluating the
moral processes and social consequences of policies and programs. but it does lend itself to lay.
sis as well. it seems ready made to describe and interpret and compare moral
processes. It requires the capa-
ciousness of the book-length monograph to work out its findings and establish their
significance. and engineering framings
of research questions.
Although it includes formal methods for getting at things like kinship relations.
. and then it struggles to go back toward
the general.
It is not a compelling way of providing causality. it seriously goes against the grain of space-time compression. pace the usual fear among ethicists about its encouragement
of cultural relativism.

I plan to provide that
summary in the book that I am now preparing.. 4 (1997): 456-57 and Paul Farmer et al. I do this intentionally. see Solomon Benatar.
. such a change in sensibility will
amount to too little too late unless it helps to usher in new politi-
cal and economic policies to address the social roots of social
suff ering. Poverty and AIDS
(Boston: Common Courage Press..
Readers will doubless note that I cut the conclusion short without providing a
fully developed theoretical summary.” Cambridge Quarterly of Healthcare
Ethics 6 (1992): 317-415. That book extends these two
lectures into a more fully developed theory of how moral processes and ethnical dis-
course can be related. Women. 420 The Tanner Lectures on Human Values
brought us that at least clarifies the magnitude and form of that
threatening future.” Journal of the Royal College of Physicians of London 31. 96
96 For a cautionary discussion of why any engagement with ethical issues con-
cerning social suffering must contain explicit engagement with political-economic
issues. eds.
no. especially as regards the developing world and the poor in the technologically
advanced world. “World Health Report 1996: Some
Millennial Challenges. Of course. 1996). It does so by setting out an anthropological method for medi-
cal ethics and an ethnographic grounds for advancing human rights that also privi-
leges the way both are realized in local worlds. Solomon Benatar. “Just Health Care beyond Individualism:
Challenges for North American Bioethics.